I'm going to have to declare Offtopic here, and due to my lack of mod points, I will just declare it publicly here.

Your comparison isn't a good one. It would be like losing your vision for 40 minutes and wandering around with deep holes around for you to fall in. Once you're in those holes it's a fair chance you won't survive unless someone helps you out.

OP was examining the long term effects of this experiment on the dolphins being experimented on and not the short term effects of SONAR use in the wild. His comparison holds, as it does a better job illustrating the point OP was trying to make.

Anything that is used for prolonged periods (16 hours) is going to have detrimental effects on the mammals' methods of navigation. Why is it such a terrible crime that the Navy consider what damage it does to its surroundings? Not implying you, it's just their stance is TeRRorisM! our actions can't be hindered.

Again, I'm not quite sure how this is related to the OP whatsoever. The OP was denouncing the experiments not because he felt the Navy shouldn't be concerned, but rather because the unreasonably high dBs that the dolphins were being subjected to.

I've always thought that the illusion of free will comes from a point you bring up, here. Kant argues that his ethical theory is grounded in reason, and that anyone who is reasonable will agree and those who are "defective" will not. However, the brain by its very nature is defective in both function and capacity. I think free will is merely a mental mechanism that we use to justify not performing the most ideal action in a given situation. Rather than giving into the idea that our imperfect brains make our bodies perform an action in a given circumstance (oftentimes leading to performing a bad act), the subjective nature of individualism doesn't allow us to seriously take this into account and instead uses the same subjective nature of choice to justify the action.

Just as an interesting aside, one of the more sensible ideas of gene function is as a "context sensitive difference maker." In this definition, genes don't code for anything by themselves, but only through environment do they allow for phenotypic expression. In the measles example you gave, the measles may have robbed the environment from something required for the genes that code hearing to express their phenotype.

Given that possibility, it would be interesting to determine if the thumbless person has a sequence that, given certain environmental conditions, does not express its phenotype or if there is a sequence actively coding the lack of thumbs given a certain environment.