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Should We Clone a Neanderthal?
SpaceAdmiral writes "Forget cloning a woolly mammoth — should scientists clone a Neanderthal? Such a feat should be possible soon, although it raises a number of bioethics concerns, including where to draw the line between humans and other animals."
I am not the most religious of people, but does this not sound eerily like Revelation? The dead of past ages coming to life is quite creepy.
On the ethics issue, who is going to raise this child? Real parents? Or a bunch of scientists? I would define a Neanderthal as a human, and that means the clone should have Rights like everyone else. What about people who are prejudiced? I mean, if racism is a tough thing to grow up with, what about speciism ? A bunch of kids teasing him for being an "ape" could not be fun.
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Hey, it's slippery-slope man!
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Whatever happened to the wooly mammoth? Years ago, some company was going to try to clone one, and have an elephant carry it to birth. That would have been cool.
A neanderthal, though? I dunno. There's just something creepy about cloning something to study... that can be embarrassed by the fact that it's being studied.
On the upside, I have no doubt that he/she would make it big in fetish porn.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Put me in a room with a bear, repeat a hundred times and see who comes out on top. Doesn't mean the bear is smarter.
Nope, his brain was most likely removed without permission: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein's_brain
Anyways cloning humans isn't against human rights or unethical. Would you debate your existence if someone told you that you were cloned? What if humanity lost its ability to naturally procreate? Would it suddenly change to not being against God's will? Humans play God every day when we take or prolong life, and I say if it's for the better of humanity, I'm sure God would be cool with it.
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Neanderthals were social, tool making beings. A solitary human being, raised in isolation, is not more more capable than a Neanderthal. This same human being will also be very maladjusted and unhappy, and thus not display "normal" behavior.
So, we must be fully ready to accept this thing as a sentient being, or not at all. Simply assuming that it could be kept locked up in a zoo or like a mental patient will reflect poorly.
And don't get me started on the obvious religious objections this project would face.
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Except that a cloned individual is only genetically identical.
That'll be a Catch 22 if we can clone people and their memories, which isn't reasonably a thing to be expected.
Put a hundred of you and a hundred bears on an island and see who comes out on top. A larger world with more options means more opportunity for intelligence to provide an advantage.
Chances are that the hundred of you would be working in packs with primitive weapons to wipe out the bears within a week.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Very good point. To take it a little farther:
Cloning is not magical powers. The clone will be born as a baby, grow up to adulthood over time. Any neanderthal culture is long gone; it would have to be raised either as an animal or a human being. Assuming that we're not being monsters here (not the only possibility, but the one I'm going to go with), let's assume that we want the neanderthal to do well, and to be treated according to its mental ability.
So we're left with a few possibilities.
Case 1: It has sub-human intellect to the point where it is satisfied/only capable of the animal level of mental function. This is the easy one; we can treat it like a zoo animal, with only the moral considerations usually involved with such. Physical evidence says this is pretty unlikely, but we don't really know.
Case 2:It's capable of the lower levels of human functionality. Say, somewhere between Forest Gump and a chimpanzee. Well, in this case, we have an intelligent being, who is a ward of the state, and who is unlike any other being on earth. It has no family, and potentially no human rights. It's entirely subject to the whims of its creators, or to the vagaries of laws that don't cover it. And who is it going to play with as a child? What is it going to do when it's older? How much experimentation is legally and morally allowable? What if it's below the legal threshold of mental function for consent, but is undeniably intelligent?
So, huge minefield there. Awesome.
Case 3: The Neanderthal is as smart as we are.
Fuck. We have all the problems of Case 2, and more. We just made a person that is, by definition, part of the world's smallest and loneliest minority. He or she will never be able to live a remotely normal or fulfilling life. Furthermore, he's coming into the world with ready-made enemies in those opposed to cloning.
I'm genuinely conflicted about this. If someone went ahead and cloned a neanderthal, I would want to talk to him/her more than anything else in the world. Talking to an intelligent being that's not human... that would be an amazing thing.
But seriously... I can't see any way that this could really be morally ok.
Well, since the downsides of religions are usually connected with the attempts to suppress other religions, I'd say we would have gotten all the downsides and none of the upsides and thus would be worse off than now.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Actually, look at the evidence we have for Neanderthals. They
- built tools to build other tools with. Chimps build improvised tools for the moment, then discard them. Building a hammer, so you can build an axe with it, is a human trait and implies quite a bit of intelligence.
- apparently had at least some level of work specialization and that would imply some form of commerce. At least as in, "me give you dead antelope, if you make me big strong stone spear." Again, that's not something chimps do. (Though Bonobos seem to have figured out stuff like "I'll give you two bananas for sex.")
- they built crude musical instruments (but then it took H. Sapiens a long time to make any better ones too.)
- they seem to have had (primitive) ceremonial burial, which in turn implies _some_ concept of afterlife or at least remorse. That's a bit of abstract concept there. You don't see a cat giving her dead kitten an elaborate burial.
- they decorated themselves with crude "jewellery" and paints (i.e., basically cosmetics). Again, it seems to suggest some kind of society and the brain power where that kind of thing matters. E.g., the concept of a social status. You don't even bother carrying, say, a necklace of sabertooth teeth unless that tells the others something about you martial prowess and that matters somehow. Or maybe if you have some kind of a mythology where that invokes the power of that tiger, but that's even more complex thinking.
- they skinned animals and made primitive clothes and shelters. (Well, primitive by our standards, but quite ahead of just digging a burrow like an animal.)
- apparently some figured out how to use coal, where it was easily accessible. (Homo Sapiens never really bothered too much with it until the industrial age.)
Etc.
I'd say that's clearly ahead of animal level. I'd say it's at the very least Forest Gump level.
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Your post is very interesting, and I like it and agree with almost all your points except
He or she will never be able to live a remotely normal or fulfilling life.
I am sure that this person, who is different physically in some ways from the average person, can have a fulfilling and happy life. Even now we have people that are much more disfigured than a neanderthal would be (and who says that with normal shaving and toilette he/she wouldn't in fact look attractive, what with being tall and extremely muscular), and they still have happy and fulfilling lives, for the most part.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
You could make a very good argument that the atomic bomb created a much more stable post-WWII political atmosphere. How many people would have died in a US-USSR showdown?
The entire argument against cloning is coming from well-meaning, do-gooders who for the most part, lack the capacity to understand the implications of cloning. There seems to be this thought that a cloned individual would be lacking in some capacity or held up as a carnival sideshow.
You may recall that back in 1978 the same furor erupted over the idea of a test-tube-baby. Louise Brown was raised as a normal child, had a normal upbringing and has her own family now. I would bet that if you asked her what her opinion is on being a test-tube-baby, she would look you in the eye and wonder how your head is screwed on.
Maybe the fears really revolve around our definition of what is intelligence and the seat of the soul. Intellect, development and the human condition are easy to define. The theocratic's will argue on the state of the soul (an intangible as we know it). To put the brakes on bringing a clone to life because of our fear that they would not have a soul is in the land of isty-misty bogeyman stories.
Cloning, even from an intact cell, should not raise such a visceral reaction, unless there is some belief that this will "steal" a soul from heaven or hell. Cloning of the long dead (even from pieces of DNA re-assembled in a laboratory process) is no different from a theological standpoint.
We are not going to create a "neanderthal park" where people will come and gawk at the nearly human. But we do need to define what is an intelligent being (dolphins, apes, neanderthal's, etc...) before some intelligence comes to our planet and decides that we are amongst the least intelligent on our own planet.
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There's no pre-existing racial slur to calling a white person a monkey, therefore it is safe to assume that the white person in question actually resembles a monkey. Calling a black person a monkey... well, maybe you mean he resembles a monkey, and maybe you are using a racial slur.
Also, a few idiots blaming the wrong people and threatening/committing violence does not equal "the Left". It equals a few idiots.
If you believe that a few nutballs represents the entire Left, then you have to believe that every idiot who does reprehensible things on the Right actually represents everyone on the Right.
I agree, though, the rules should apply to everyone. Everyone deserves to be treated with basic respect, in my opinion.
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The Mormon church provided millions of dollars to help swing the vote, which is generally what "the gays" are upset about ... although "targeting" is a unique way of putting it. Probably reading some right wing news sources, like the new york times, would help you out.
But then this goes way past half-truths and misinformation ... stop listening to Fox News, it makes you look like an idiot.
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Actually, it is unethical--because of the flaws in the process & results. I'm guessing that you have no idea how many deformed & crippled sheep they get before they get a single "good" clone--or how the "good" clone ages much more rapidly than a naturally born sheep. If the process were perfected, then there would be plenty of room for debate about ethics, but as the process stands now, it would highly unethical to clone a person.
Much of our surgical tech. CAME from those experiments.
Hardly. Almost all of the Nazi medical experiments were surgically useless. AFAIK, they didn't invent any new surgical techniques. They did learn a few things about how long humans can survive under extreme conditions, but that's about it, and it didn't even lead to much in the way of new treatments. I think hypothermia may have been an exception. Most of their experimentation was just sadism of little medical or scientific value, and a lot of it was biased to "prove" various Nazi racial theories.
Our knowledge of a number of diseases certainly came from there.
Again, not really. They experimented with drugs/cures for various diseases. They didn't discover any new diseases, didn't discover anything about how the diseases work inside the body, and as far as I know, didn't lead to cures for any major disease.
Not so fast. We're anything *but* disarmed. Last I looked we still have loads of deployed nuclear weapons pointing at each other, and are now entering an age of increased geopolitical instability and acute resource shortages. Oil, fresh water, metals... all are going to be in short supply. This is not the time to become complacent and think we've dodged the nuclear bullet as the varying large superpowers and superpower wannabes try to out-dick each other for what's left of an ever-decreasing pie.