Phenotypic Freedom

Our clade is the group of organisms to which we belong that have evolved from a common ancestor. In human terms, we can all trace our beginnings back to the first Homo erectus. A more recent common ancestry is our membership in the descendants of that hardy bunch that first left Africa and could be called "modern humans." Since that time, we have developed many superficial characteristics and mentalities that have been used to divide us. All the different ways we use to classify "the other."

There are, of course, some biological differences between the different branches of the modern human. Some are tied to very real genetic markers, but most of them are just artificial human creations. The analysis of human differences can be divided into two principle divisions. Morphology is "a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structure of …show more content…
Humans already have a problem dividing people based on body characteristics such as skin color, birth sex, and sexual orientation. Of course, there are also the numerous epistemological differences, but those are another subject entirely. The development of these new technologies requires that we create a new type of freedom to cover these changes and to cover the natural variations in humans that do not relate to developed skills.

This new kind of freedom is Phenotypic Freedom. Phenotypic Freedom is the "freedom to be free of discrimination based any type of phenotypic trait." A phenotypic trait is "is a distinct variant of a phenotypic characteristic of an organism; it may be either inherited or determined environmentally, but typically occurs as a combination of the two." In other words, all the various and idiosyncratic differences that occur between different members of our species, but extended to the variations we have yet to see