A prominent devout British Jew, with a high media profile, Lord Winston, has declared himself in favour of more testing on primates, eg chimpanzees. (see also the footnote page)This has implications for non-Jews because we are only two million years in evolutionary terms from apes. I have heard many people state their belief, explicitly and implicitly, in Judaism, from an actress on television saying “the Jews were admired for their intellect”, to non-jewish ladies both marrying Jews for qualities they admire and even a North England female politician, opposed by Islamic candidates, saying she wanted to be a Jew. It is also generally acknowledged in the population that they are very clever and their is a huge list of high achieving Jews in business, (Sir Alan Sugar, the Tesco empire of Shirley Porter, the Sainsbury’s retail organisation, Marks and Spencer, James Goldsmith), in the arts, (Bruce Forsyth, Lucien Freud, Elvis Costello), journalism, (Natasha Kaplinsky, Howard Jacobsen, Dominic Lawson), politics, (British home secretaries Jack Straw, Nigel Lawson) and that is without mentioning Jews outside elsewhere such as Einstein, Oppenheimer etc. Why is that a problem, surely their work is for all our benefits? This is largely true and many non-jews would aspire to their achievements. But what if this is the first signs of genetic superiority of the sort that differentiated humans from apes or Neanderthals. does that not mean that at some point in the future Lord Winston’s descendants may feel, 25,000 years from now that it is justified to test drugs on the descendants of Europeans, Chinese and Africans because they will have evolved into a superior species. In fact a sense that such may be happening may be exactly why some non-jewish women choose to marry Jews or ‘want to be a Jew’

I would suggest there needs to be a larger separation between humans and any animals that are experimented on than Lord Winston’s interest in more ape testing. But that is just my opinion.

I wonder sometimes what his God, Jehovah, bestows on him apart from wealth, family happiness and fame, all of which I am sure he is very grateful for. This God has been invented in the past four thousand years. Over hundreds of millions of years, by contrast, life has evolved in the oceans and we can, for the moment while biodiversity is allowed, see cleaner shrimp and small cleaner fish open up what amounts to almost a dentist or barber shop around coral reefs. Larger fish come along and allow these small creatures to eat the scraps in their teeth and gills and both benefit. This compassion of fish for other species is founded in mutual benefit, yet we humans choose to torment our animals in laboratories, deriving benefit while imposing a non-mutual benefit relationship

With Jesus son of Jehovah telling all non-jews to live simple lives, meaning uneducated poverty, without being able to afford health care and Moroni of the Mormon faith telling us he hopes the Jews become a fair and comely people, it seems the nearest we get to compassion is to become the equivalent of cleaner fish, picking up the scraps from the table of wealthy Jews.

On one memorable programme Lord Winston looked into the camera and said “You’re amazing”. I sometimes wonder if he was looking at his own reflection in the lens rather than talking to the British audience, (with thanks to the British satirical magazine ‘Privet Eye’ for inspiring that last comment).

I should reiterate I don’t blame Jews. If I was an Anglican and wealthy, happy and famous I probably would have been seduced into being sarcastic to unbelievers myself, prior to seeing the truths of Buddha and Darwin. I just think Jews are wrong and concomitantly Christians and Muslims also wrong to believe in the ‘victories’ they do of the triumph of some God invented laws.