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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."
Hey, it's slippery-slope man!
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
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.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
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.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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?
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.