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Scientist Seeks 'Adventurous Human Woman' For Neanderthal Baby
theodp writes "Harvard geneticist George Church recently told Der Spiegel he's close to developing the necessary technology to clone a Neanderthal, at which point all he'd need is an 'adventurous human woman' to be a surrogate mother for the first Neanderthal baby to be born in 30,000 years (article in German, translation to English). Church said, 'We have lots of Neanderthal parts around the lab. We are creating Neanderthal cells. Let's say someone has a healthy, normal Neanderthal baby. Well, then, everyone will want to have a Neanderthal kid. Were they superstrong or supersmart? Who knows? But there's one way to find out.'"
With that sort of gestation time, it's no wonder Neanderthals went extinct.
They should ask one of those Kardashian women. They'll do anything for money as long as they can put their name on it.
Were they superstrong or supersmart? Who knows? But there's one way to find out
Well I don't know about the former, but given they are all dead I'm pretty sure about the latter.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
He's not seeking such a woman, nor is he planning to do so. He is just thinking out loud, what if...
It would make sense to clone a mammoth first, using an Asian elephant as a surrogate. The last mammoths on Wrangel Island were alive only 2000 years ago, so their DNA should be much more intact. If we can clone the mammoth successfully, then we can do the neanderthal next.
That saying about the sum being greater than it's parts, only applies when you know how the parts fit together.
Having spent some time in rural Northern Germany, I believe Neanderthals are still alive.
Someone is getting Tenure.
I'm afraid to to read the actual article to see if its someone I know from Grad school or some poor bastard I taught.
They need "humans" with thicker skulls after all the brain damage lawsuits.
Table-ized A.I.
Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov. They all resulted in failure (allegedly, some conspiracy theorists insist he was at least partially successful). I don't think that he'll have difficulty finding volunteers, only finding a place with neighbors who aren't keen on pitchforks and torches.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
I found one to have my potentially ugly baby.
*ducks head*
I seem to recall this being a sci-fi short story somewheres a long time ago... "Jerry Was A Boy"? or something similar to that as the title.
My money is on really strong and really dumb. Apparently a winning combination.
I realize that this guy's intentions are honorable, well maybe not, but this sounds like something that really shouldn't be done along the lines of Jurassic Park. With all of the problems in the world, we have a guy here who is trying to bring back an extinct race of people? Somehow I think that the old Nazi era eugenics movement never stopped. Next thing you know we'll have immigrant Neanderthal workers takin our jobs! Let's just leave the bringing old species alone and keep Neanderthals where they belong! Extinct! I don't want to see a Mammoth roaming about, besides with global warming it would lose its hair and it would be killed within a few short years for the ivory.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I don't mean to sound too flippant about this, but isn't this around the time in the movie that a Morgan Freeman type of character says "People were not meant to play at god!"?
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
Schwarzenegger is afraid of the competition
Table-ized A.I.
Call Spielberg. I've got a movie idea - though I might be thinking of something I saw on one of the "adult" channels...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
O.K. Fine. Whatever. I'll go make room in the trailer park for another trailer. Stupid ass scientist making more work... /grumble
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Actually, his mom already participated in this experiment
I consider myself very scientific, fairly worldly, and pretty open minded.
But to me this is unethical.
Ask yourself just some simple preliminary questions such as: If the resulting semi-human is self aware, what rights will it/he/she have? Will it/he/she be a cage animal? Will it be sterilized or allowed to reproduce? And if so, with which other species or semi-species? Is this fair to it/he/she? Will it/he/she be allowed to vote? To own property? Be allowed or required to work? To choose a field of education? To be free of staring, poking prodding?
This will definitely give the bio-ethicists something to chew on.
Credo sim. - I think I am.
If this actually happens, I hope that the kid beats the living shit out of the asshole who wanted him for a lab animal.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Am I the only one that thinks this is a bad idea?
The Ugly Little Boy. Nothing further needs saying.
Edith Fellowes. She has experience caring for an ugly little boy
So we can just skip the artificial insemination and do it the good ol' fashion way...
One hundred thousand years ago, a caveman was out hunting in the plains, when he slipped and fell into a crevasse, where he was frozen solid. In 1988, he was discovered by scientists and was thawed out. He then attended law school and became...The Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer!
I have no idea if they had red hair - who knows. While it might be interesting to do, they were wiped out by human's ancestors so don't mess with the timeline. Or is the evolution of man to be able to change history? Oh philosophy how you taunt me.
Will they have rights? Be aloud to breed? That sort of cruel to bring something that will most likely be able to communicate and think very much like we do and told that their an experiment and are essentially somebodies property.
I asked God what Neanderthals thought about... "warmth". Let's ask what they did for fun! C:\Text\WALDEN.TXT against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party. However, I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill. I was never molested by any person but those who represented the State. I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a nail to put over my latch or windows. I never fastened my door night or day, though I was to b
There's been a lot of mutual adaptation of humans to their pathogens the last 10k years that Neandethals would lack. Might mean they'd die easily of common benign infections, of less likely not get them at all.
Oddly enough, when it's born, it'll look just like Dr Church.
They were probably neither super-smart nor super-strong, just super-horny. They screwed their way into oblivion...or was it immortality?
OCTO MOM. Think about it... this is genius.
How would this 'adventurous human woman' collect from the dead(beat) dad?
A few months ago Wired had an article with a list. Here's a link to a writeup about iton the web in the UK's Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8702999/Unethical-scientific-experiments-going-to-extremes.html
Why'd You kill Neanderthals? God says... C:\Text\WEALTH.TXT ypt, on the contrary, though it exported some manufactures, fine linen in particular, as well as some other goods, was always most distinguished for its great exportation of grain. It was long the granary of the Roman empire. The sovereigns of China, of ancient Egypt, and of the different kingdoms into which Indostan has, at different times, been divided, have always derived the whole, or by far the most considerable part, of their revenue, from some sort of land tax or land rent. This land tax, o
Not so fast, batman. Nobody said anything about the woman being its mother. If she has the cell implanted and carries the embryo until it is born then she is not the genetic mother, just a surrogate, in effect a living germination vessel.
Half life of DNA is 500 years, http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11555 myth busted. So you can forget about dinosaurs, neanderthals and the like.
Was the native american wiped out by lack of smarts?
I wasn't aware they were all dead. Oh wait, they aren't.
Incas wipes out by lack of smarts?
They had the same period of time to develop guns the spanish did. They did not. Therefore...
The book goes on to point out advanced weapons aren't in the hands of advanced individuals, but merely individuals who've had the benefit of living in fertile areas that could support an educated class.
I am curious what makes you think Mexico is not extremely fertile.
The book actually argues that while advanced civilizations make advanced things, they also lower the bar for the culling of dumb individuals, and suffer more of them.
Well I can't really argue with that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If it turns out that a Neanderthal girl is born she could very well be trained from birh to have her rightful place as a male servant and actually stay in the kitchen, cook meals, clean, and have sex with her master whenever he wanted it. She'd be easier to train too then all these feminist bitches who think they should have equal rights to men! They belong in the home and kitchen just like a properly trained Neanderthal woman should with proper training of course.
Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) didn’t go extinct because they were outcompeted. They weren’t a separate species. They were a subspecies of Homo sapiens. Our superior numbers drove them into extinction, not our ostensibly superior technology, intellect or planning.
Our Paleolithic ancestors said, “Me love you long time,” and they simply disappeared into our gene pool.
HRH The Duke of Windsor
Neanderthals crossbred with our ancestors, so I don't really see the point of this hypothetical experiment... In any case, it's rather unethical because a fair bit of our immunity to disease is genetic, and rapidly evolving. For example, most humans alive today bear some resistance to the plague and influenza H1N1 because they killed such a large portion of our population. Bringing back a Neanderthal would subject them to diseases 30,000 years more advance in the evolutionary arms race. The poor kid would likely spend most of it's life in the hospital before dieing at an early age. If it was healthy enough to go to school it would be bullied for being different, which could have very tragic consequences if it happened to be much stronger than a normal child.
Secondly, a lot of viruses embed themselves in our genome. It's almost guaranteed that if a Neanderthal caught the virus, so could modern humans. We do have the advantage of being 30,000 years more advance, but it's also possible we've lost our resistance in that time. Even scarier, it's entirely possible that Neanderthals went extinct because of a virus, which could have been what killed whichever Neanderthal they got the DNA from.
The idea has a strange appeal.
But surely, we can do this with a 3D printer at home? Let's fill up the test tubes by other means.
20 minutes into the future
Germany is one of the countries that is most radically opposed to human cloning. Usually, the aversion is justified with "Germany's Nazi past", but it's really just the Catholic church and its hangups about reproduction. So: wrong country to be discussing this.
How in the world are we going to find a woman that can live 30,000 years to have this baby?
You don't need to be that intelligent in this day and age. The biggest threat to life is truly crossing the street.
Nothing to see.
It is so simple, even a caveman can do it!
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
What I'm more concerned about, is how he will be treated : what rights will he have . What is the legal definition of 'human' ?
If it's not covered by law, we need Neanderthal rights as soon as possible, or they might just start experimenting on him ( which I find horrible for any animal though, but it's currently still legal ).
Slipping shoelaces ?
God exctincted them for a reasin what it it is we don't and can't know.
Keep the whitehouse white, vote Trump & Palin 2020.
In language, Neanderthal means someone stupid, slow and rather ugly. If I called you a Neanderthal it would be an insult... but what were they really like? And from that, what is homo sapiens (us) really like?
Our self image is rather that we are the smartest animal and the best hunter, the strongest, the brightest, the best looking. What if we weren't? What if we just were a rather vicious monkey that just fucked faster?
There are a LOT of theories about how Home Sapiens came to be and how the Neanderthal came not to be.
Some "facts" (It is a fast moving field and there is a lot of stuff that journalists might have made up/mis-quoted):
Current theories is that we interbred (DNA evidence) but HOW? Did we freely mingle? Did one or the other keep each other as (sex) slaves. Did we rape each other in conflict?
A thing to remember is that if Neanderthal is a separate species, how can they interbreed? Breeds within a species can interbreed easily (see dogs) but between species it isn't supposed to be that easy. Of course there are exceptions, zebra/horse tiger/lion.
When Darwin published his work, the shock was NOT that Genesis wasn't true, they already knew that. The shock was that nature was nasty. Similar, it would be a shock to find out that Neanderthal was the smarter, stronger ape. Lets face it, how many of us want to be vicious Chimpansee who slaughters the Bonobo just for the fun of it? (Not saying the two do that but when we acknowledge a link to the apes, poop flinging is NOT mentioned.
Shrunken heads originate from a tribe that is often said to be the most nasty humans who ever lived. Did we outnasty the gentle Neanderthal? OR did the already established Neanderthal in Europe take that new tribe as sex slaves and then found that the slaves bred faster and replaced them from within? Or was the Neanderthal really just a dumb brute and we outwitted them? Did we mercilessly slaughter them or keep them around as slaves or did we just happily live together after all and we just merged?
Ultimately it shouldn't mean anything but people have based entire religions/dogmas on lies with terrible results, maybe it is time for our origin story to be based on truth.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Were they superstrong or supersmart? Who knows? But there's one way to find out.
See whether they can navigate the Geico website?
[Just kidding ... apologies to my caveman friends.]
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
They are called Rethuglicans and Asspies.
Everyone knows that there are animals that are stronger than we are. I also don't think that humans are the best hunters, nor do I think too many people think they are. And of course "best looking" is not an objective trait. What most humans do think is that we are the most intelligent, and that this more than compensates our other weaknesses, because we can just outsmart all other animals.
BTW, what is the difference between "the smartest" and "the brightest"?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
t of us (excepting most Africans and Chinese) have Neanderthal genes in us.
I suggest you go back and do more study.
Of all the human sub-species only the Africans do not have Neanderthal genes.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53eaUZGY4xA
Species do not fight for habitat between themselves, unless habitat is very, very crowded.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Being intelligent don't ensure your survival. You needed a lot of intelligence to build atomic bombs, and see what could had happened.
Anyway, intelligence is just part of the equation. Culture is another, an important one. How much different should be a neanderthal intelligence to be distinguished from one of us if grows with our culture? And maybe more important, if with our culture is more or less like us, at least in the way of thinking, will be falling in the same kind of moral problems like growing kids on labs?
I agree intelligence doesn't seem to be that important for survival. Dinosaurs lasted for 150 million years without brains to speak of, until they were nuked from orbit, an end which our superior intellect would not have protected us from either, at least not in the first few hundred thousand years of our existence as modern humans.
As for the demise of the Neanderthal: no need to look at culture or intelligence, simple environmental factors will do. The last ice age was particularly long and brutal. The Eurasian mega fauna, which the Neanderthals depended on for food, died out. Modern humans in Eurasia could be replenished from their habitat in Africa, with much more favorable conditions, while the Neanderthal was trapped in Europe and western Asia.
Dogs are more vicious then humans, but we humans completely dominate dogs. Cats are vicious bastards but the number of incidents of cats killing people are remarkably low (because cats are very good at hiding evidence no doubt).
Viciousness is NOT a survival trait unlike what a LOT of people believe. Darwin shocked people NOT by telling them they were descended from monkeys but by telling them nature was nasty and so were monkeys. BUT more recent research among monkeys has filmed evidence that for instance a male monkey that beats the old male leader and then goes to town on the females WILL be beaten up by ALL the females and then the old defeated male will be put back in power, with the help of some trusted lieutenants and an understanding he no longer has exclusive access to the females but still access. The defeated vicious monkey is all alone and will die from his wound without a group to protect him.
What monkey sires more children? The old wise leader who knows not to push his position? His lieutenants who can learn peacefully under a wise leader while fucking their brains out? Or the vicious monkey who had access for just a few days?
Genghis Khan is often called vicious but was he? His military approach was to kill the elite in a country and then treat the peasants pretty damned nicely. Gosh and who tells us he was a bad guy? Our elite... because they prefer to have their peasants kill each other off while they sit miles behind the front. That is how wars are supposed to be fought, destroy the body so you can strike a deal with the head. While GK killed the head and then was nice to the body.
French revolution is often said to be brutal. By the English... nobles who damn well knew that if the idea of a benevolent revolution and rule by the people was to spread, their necks would be next on the block.
Which ape is more successful, the Chimpanzee or the Bonobo (the make love not war ape)? Fact is strive costs a LOT of energy, the more relaxed you are, the more you can survive in hard times. There is a group of Baboons (typically a vicious monkey) that lives peacefully in gigantic groups because their environment is so poor in nutrition, they have to remain peaceful because fighting requires to much energy.
The thing to remember here is that there have been load of vicious cultures in human history. And they died out. Image if we acted like cats and each time we saw another cat, a half hour staredown was in order. How would we ever make even a small village work? Let alone metropolis with tens of millions of people living statistically in perfect peace with each other.
We are NOT a vicious monkey, are the industrious ant or the harmonious bee. Sure there are incidents but statistcally speaking all the murders in NY are insignificant compared to the total amount of human interaction going on. Netherlands Amsterdam, 1 mil people, 40 or so murders. A bee-hive, 44k a dozen murders (new queen killing other queens) and that is NOTHING to say of the killing off of elderly or sick bees, euthanisia is legal in Holland but it is not the "lets round up the oldies on Friday" that Fox news told you it was. It is Thursdays.
It has been proven that sleeping together with a loved one reduces stress, lowers heartbeat (slower is better as you only get so many beats per heart) and prolongs life in humans and chipmunks. Hell, indoor cats can be evil all they want but exceed 20 years in lifespan while their relatives on the street barely reach their teens. Viciousness doesn't pay of long term. oh, sometimes there are hickups but overal, the human race has grown ever more peaceful. And YES, long standing conflicts like the middle east or Afghanistan and Iraq PROOF this. The OLD way we saw all to recently in Ruwanda. It hasn't happened in a long time, not on that scale. Even the holocaust was different, Ruwanda was the people killing people. The germans have at least pretended (even if it is part a lie) that it was a small group that did the actual killing. The rest just stood by
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Look, if they were weaker and stupider than we are, great, nothing we couldn't have gathered from the fact that we're alive today, and they're not. If they're smarter than we are, how the fuck did we beat them? How are we alive and they are not? Odds are they were stronger... being weaker than everything around you, being slower, having senses not as sharp... all these things add up to HAVING TO BE SMARTER to survive. I surmise we are exactly as weak as we needed to be to be able to survive principally on brains; if we were stronger, faster, could hide better, we wouldn't have been forced to develop our intellect. Ironically, being faster, stronger, able to fly, having better/more accurate vision or hearing would have made us weaker in the end, by reducing the number of obstacles we had to overcome as a species.
If they somehow turn out to be stronger and smarter... why the hell would we want THAT sort of thing around?!? To what? Compete with us? What a retarded idea!!! Why not leave well enough the fuck alone?
You don't have to synthesize the entire cell. Only the nuclear and mitochondrial chromosomes matter. If you can replace the ones in a normal cell, what you have after division is the primitive cell reborn. You have to do this to a lot of cells, and grow them for a while, to get one without significant damage.
Bruce Perens.
Talk about aptronyms!
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Intentionally bringing an evolutionary throwback into the world is an act of scientific sadism. Imagine yourself a child unable to fit it, and then learning that you were instantiated merely to satisfy a sociopath's curiosity. Have we returned to the 1930s?
I kind of think that the ethics board should seriously look into this. Is the newborn going to be classified as a human? If it is, then is it fair for it to be subjected to all the DNA defects induced by 30,000 years exposure? Is this safe for the mother?
But aren't humans the best hunters? Is there an animal that a human can't hunt successfully (with human made tools)? Or does only purely physical effort count when hunting? If that is the case, then wolves are pretty lousy hunters too, since they need to cooperate to bring down prey, most cats are lousy hunters since they need to ambush their prey,....
You are missing the posters point. If we have the ability to reproduce much faster than we are not able to stop the mass of people.
Let me illustrate, and PLEASE nobody call this racism.
How many children are produced in the Western world? How many children are produced in the emerging world? Who is the less ignorant? BTW I use ignorant, and not less intelligent here. Drum roll, less children in western world, and less ignorant people in the western world. You could argue that the western world is being drowned out by ignorant emerging world people. The irony here is that as we become more knowleagable we produce less children, dooming our society so to speak. However, with enough generations that ignorance is removed.
In essence the Neanderthal could have indeed been the one with the more brains or life experience or what you want to call it. But they were drowned out by the number of people reproducing. Remember that back then people used clubs on each other and there was not much civility.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Really? Ever read Farley Mowatt and the lost people?
Let me give you the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farfarers:_Before_the_Norse
I did not think that habitat was very crowded in the North...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Spiegel has an international site which is easier to read than the translation:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/george-church-explains-how-dna-will-be-construction-material-of-the-future-a-877634.html
So why isn't this 'professor' studying them?
BTW before you say, "Oh Farley Mowatt a man of fiction..." He postulated many things that later proved to be correct. He is a man of history who combines it with some reasoned leap of faith or as I like to call it deduced reasoning.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Last documentary I saw on the subject of neanderthal DNA suggested that they had only come to find the neanderthal DNA by pasting different strands together from various individuals. The likelihood of serious genetic defects must be quite high. If this is so, the child may not live, or even if it does, it could very well be stricken with serious genetic illnesses, making it as useful as a source of information as a child with Down Syndrome would be as a source of information on modern humans. Or did I miss something?
And then there are the implications in the form of human rights for the child. Neanderthals were quite clearly both sentient and sapient, so the child should have the same basic rights as the rest of us. There is a whole ethical mine-field here.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
I grew up literally an ocean away from the Washington monument and yet I speak and write considerably better than most of those who grew up near it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neandertal
Seriously, what sort of life would this baby have? Growing up being an extinct race, being poked and prodded by scientist, being a public figure, from birth. Then on top of that, you have whatever Neanderthal's have, big forehead, mono brow (that is going to go over big in school), and that not even going into how intelligent it is.
This baby would be born into a live of hell.
Be seeing you...
We have trouble enough trying to get along within a single one.
I believe that the blue eye kind of trait appeared some 8000 years ago .
http://scienceblog.com/15361/all-blue-eyed-humans-have-common-ancestor/
(apparently green eyes are NOT a manifestation of blue eyes, but just a lack of melanin)
Blondes appeared somewhat earlier. Wikipedia tells us (citing The Times)
"Based on recent genetic research carried out at three Japanese universities, the date of the genetic mutation that resulted in blond hair in Europe has been isolated to about 11,000 years ago during the last ice age" Wikipedia also references a recent 2012 paper in Science that discusses multiple evolutions of the blonde phenotype. Austrailian Aboriginal people show the blonde trait, etc.
So your 30,000 year old neandertal DNA is probably brown eyed, brown haired..
Never mind all the hundreds of millions of malnourished humans all over the world. Best hunters, my ass.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I wonder what the legal status of the baby be: considered human or some grey area in between...
A little scary, perhaps.
Talk to Sylvester Stallone's mother. She might have some free time.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Is there an animal that a human can't hunt successfully (with human made tools)?
That depends on how you define human made tools. If you include higher order tools, then we can probably hunt almost everything. If you include only tools made directly by man, and not with other tools, we're just good, not great.
Creating tools for creating tools seems to have happened after the Neanderthal era, so I see no evidence for why we would be better hunters than them. Perhaps just better at procreating and migrating. Perhaps just better at homicide.
If that is the case, then wolves are pretty lousy hunters too, since they need to cooperate to bring down prey
No, they don't. A large number of wolves are solitary.
They often hunt in packs when they have a pack, because it's effective - both the hunt itself, and bringing down larger animals that can feed the whole pack.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_pregnancy#In_humans
Don't stop where the ink does.
There was a novel by Asimov and Silverberg called Child of Time, about bringing a Neanderthal child forward into modern time for study. Worthwhile reading for anyone considering doing something similar.
Why make a distinction between 'orders' of tools? Should you count a spearhead as a higher order tool, if it was made using a sharpened rock?
Any yes, wolves can hunt alone, just like humans can hunt without tools. But they are both pretty bad at it, compared to a wolf-pack or an armed human.
And how many prey animals are there left in their habitat? If there were herds of elephants roaming all over Africa, then the food shortage wouldn't exist there (at least not for very long). If anything the hunters did too well, exterminating potential prey.
For American football, wrestling and rugby.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Nice link, thx. There is a Republican in Michigan -- who has run for several offices -- named Rob Steele.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
So is this how the future Earth will become inhabited by ape-like creatures?
I was born without my choosing. I was forced to spend nearly 18 years in an institution, giving me tests of both my physical and mental abilities. Due to my flawed genetics, I sometimes had to go see a physician, where I'd be poked and prodded, then given drugs that'd usually make me feel worse before better.
I was a typical child.
Reading through all these ethics concerns, I really don't see much difference. The kid could go to school like any other, he'd just be watched with more interest. He might look different. So what? There are only like 3 kids in a school who look like people on tv anyway. He might get sick sometimes, but a lot of people get sick. Heck, he'd probably have a better upbringing than 95% of the rest of us, with all the financial support he'd need to do whatever he wants.
If you want to prevent this from happening, you should go out and sterilize all the dregs of our society who reproduce *all the time* already. But then you're into preferred selection, and you go into another realm people balk at.
I do actually understand your point, i think it was the basis for the film "idiocracy", the clever people took time to reproduce responsibly whilst the idiots just humped anything with a pulse...
it's a site.... where you find .... adventurous women *drops mic*
Just another second banana
She seems to be collecting one of everything.
... the humanity we have is the humanity we deserve.
We are meant to play god, but we alone have the freedom to choose to do so only in the most godlike manner possible. I say this without attempting to inject any one of countless Cosmic Muffin Persons we have imagined over the years. I mean it in the sense of ethics and morality and mercy.
Even if they manage to splice in Neanderthal DNA with full length telomeres so the critter would not suffer the fate of Dolly,,, even if the synergy with human DNA was smooth enough to produce a critter viable enough to survive... despite the ethical question of bringing a one of a kind creature into the world bereft if its own kin... the odds say that this child-combination would experience problems with natural growth, nutritional uptake and modern disease resistance. Every branch of DNA alive today has evolved alongside its environmental pathogens. Producing something with a full lifespan on the first attempt would be an almost impossible long shot.
So how many attempts would there have to be? How many numbered pickle jars in the basement?
The best case scenario, where you bring an exotic and possibly-super intelligent child into the world who is beloved and comfortable with its uniqueness -- not likely. The odds favor a tormented justifiably resentful individual.
This happens with natural born children too, but the parents can rightfully shrug and play the biology card.
What would Morgan Freeman say when the Neanderthal project turns sour and the specimen runs amok? Well the Evil Morgan Freeman would destroy the specimen, retire all the scientists with his trusty pistol, burn the building and shred all the files. Except for his personal copy.
EVIL MORGAN FREEMAN: Anita, take a memo, to the director of Central Intelligences. "C-Systems... no longer a viable entity. Will be in contact." That's it.
~~From the movie 'Chain Reaction' [1996]
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Who says there isn't womb for science in our classrooms?
But they were drowned out by the number of people reproducing.
Alternatively, humans may have perfected warfare. Sounds more plausible, because the world is pretty friggin' big.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I think your point has some validty to it. This even manifests it self at a smaller case in the Western world. Look at the US for instance. When you go into the bible belt they breed up the place like rats. Ignorance=breed,breed,breed. it may seem that ingnorance to a certain extent is good for procreation.
Just to add to your post. People complain about third world countries and the rate of their population increase, while first world (ie Western) countries now have birth rates that cannot sustain their culture/civilization. The massive influx of Muslims into Europe is not because there are too many Muslims being born elsewhere and they have no place to go. It is that there are too few Europeans being born and to sustain their economy and society, they need immigrants. Since most of the European countries are in the same boat, the influx is coming from Muslim countries. The consequence of the declining birth rate in Europe, however, is that what the world has taken for granted as a European culture will cease to exist.
This isn't unique to Europe, the same thing is happening in the US. The difference is that the influx is coming from Central and South America and Southeast Asia. The cause is the same though, too low a birth rate to sustain the economy and society. There will be similar results, too.
And worse of all is China, with their one child per couple policy (usually male). Even if today they changed that and everybody who was of child bearing age got pregnant and started having girls, by the time they sexually matured, it would be too late to turn around the decimation that has occurred.
While over population can be a problem, the planet is not (and was not) suffering from that. That was a ploy to allow for the unequal distribution of resources to continue and while successful in the short run, it is disasterous in the long run.
Here's a question, and I don't mean to be a troll. But Neanderthals are considered separate because of physical charecteristics of their skeletal structure. How do we know that this is simply not an adaptation to their environment? For instance, anthropologists can tell an Asian skeleton from an Eastern European skeleton because of various traits. We have already learned that a lot of the classes and phyllums in biology that were based on similar characteristics were wrong, once we had DNA to evaluate.
Obviously, to do this experiment, they must have Neanderthal DNA, so that begs the question of whether or not Neanderthal is a separate species or just a variation of us? And, if just a variation, would such an experiment be ethical?
Remember that back then people used clubs on each other and there was not much civility
And using nuclear warheads against people in foreign countries is civil?
Genetic transfer doesn't require interbreeding. Many virus's can take genes from the host when they mutate, and pass them on to others.
For something like this, "adventurous" or not, it's best to recruit someone who's already had some experience.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
My guess they are super strong and super intelligent and will make us extinct.
This would result in legal changes, as they are not "legally" human. Next you'd have other species getting legal recognition as "people".
> But a neanderthal is not a human (not as we know it). Most consider it to be a different species. Could any (non-human) primate that exists today fit in with our society as a citizen? Not likely. Neanderthals on the other hand were *culturally similar* to humans. They had musical instruments [discovermagazine.com] and had similar cultural habits [ucdenver.edu]. If one were born today, giving them full citizen rights would seem to be the most logical thing to do. They could probably learn basic human language at *least*, and probably lead a somewhat normal life in a human world. My question is are *we* culturally mature enough to handle them. It was just 40 years ago African American humans in America had to reassert their rights.... and even having a black president stirs some folks' pots. Can we handle Neanderthals with respect, or would we treat them like Bigfoot?
> But a neanderthal is not a human (not as we know it). Most consider it to be a different species.
Could any (non-human) primate today fit in with our society as a citizen? Not likely. Neanderthals on the other hand were *culturally similar* to humans. They had musical instruments and had similar cultural habits. If one were born today, giving them full citizen rights would seem to be the most logical thing to do. They could probably learn basic human language at *least*, and probably lead a somewhat normal life in a human world.
My question is are *we* culturally mature enough to handle them. It was just 40 years ago African American humans in America had to reassert their rights.... and even having a black president stirs some folks' pots. Can we handle Neanderthals with respect, or would we treat them like Bigfoot?
I'm just surprised that no one cited "the ugly little boy". I remember reading the novel when I was a kid. The similarities could be striking. If you take out the "time travel" part, obviously. ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy
We don't need the google translate version, there is an official one: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/george-church-explains-how-dna-will-be-construction-material-of-the-future-a-877634.html
If I were a woman I'd do it. You'd be making History.
While Dolly did take quite a few tries, cloning goats proved to be a whole lot easier.
That said, humans are probably trickier, as we have hidden estrus and a longer gestation process.
I can just imagine the backwater Baptists reaction which may be almost as awful as the unemployable, philosophy, majors who will be all afire over this being too close to cloning a human and try to back that up with the claim they are breeding a human with a non-human.
I am oh so certain that they sun will no longer rise if we do this. Next thing you know they will want to breed a gay Neanderthal with a lesbian.
Evidence suggests that Neanderthals were better hunters then Homo Sapiens. They could throw a spear longer and father then us.
The difference may have been soft skills. Neanderthals communities, IIRC, were around 30 members. Humans were around 300. Having larger communities meant a larger skill set (e.g. fishing when game was scarce), so a more heterogeneous set of skills to weather bad times.
Trust in nature? Excuse me? Nature is the craziest chemical lab ever existed, period. The sheer amount and variety of things and substances it manages to produce is simply astounding (we probably know about only a fraction of them), and a lot of them are incredibly bad for your health. Viruses transport genetic material between species since the dawn of time. That doesn't mean that cloning a neanderthal would be a good idea, or that we can't produce unhealthy things (we can, we can). It simply means that your reasoning is fallacious, or that you're not reasoning at all. Chances are, 99% of food you eat in your daily diet has been artificially selected by humans by trial and error: it's composed by plants and animals that never existed in nature (and would never had existed in nature). Today, bioengeneering permits us to do the same things, faster, better and safer. If there's a problem here, it lies in intellectual property laws and excessive regulation, not in science. We should grow out of this useless natural-vs-artificial dicotomy, and embrace new possibilities in a way that is both open and responsible, based on rational facts and not on witch hunts. Turns out that a rational analysis of GM foods shows that they could be good for both our health *and* the environment. On the GM food topics, hear mark lynas, he is way more convincing than me: http://www.marklynas.org/2013/01/lecture-to-oxford-farming-conference-3-january-2013/
Again with the nonsense. This is completely false.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_to_On_the_Origin_of_Species
Everything this person says varies between outright bullshit and half-remembered trivia from a documentary.
Why are they trying to make retarded babies? just hit up my next door neighbor, im pretty sure she can help ya out
But the survival and procreation probability for a newborn in the industrialized world is way higher than in the countries with higher birth rates.
In the case of swarm queens, you'll note that the workers control who gets to fight and who doesn't.
The workers control which swarm cells get destroyed and which don't.
The workers affect emergence in severely crowded brood conditions, allowing afterswarms (which are a bet with a small cost and a big payout, and a queen elimination strategy). Among peer queens, those of similar lineage submit, older allowing themselves to be killed (look up the normal queen bee fighting research). If the genetic lines differ, the war is on.
Sick bees are not killed - when they fall to the floor they are dragged out, same as the dead bees. Sure would make things easier if they were. Old bees are not killed - they serve as the outer layer of the cluster, with abdomen temperatures at ambient, burning out their last supplies to keep the cluster warm.
The colony, in effect, operates as a single creature, whose cells happen to be capable of independence, but never doubt that it is the workers in control, and the most bitter battles are those fought to defend the entrance to the hive, because it is the gateway to the brood and the food.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
Well, darn. Now that you’ve explicitly asked us not to call your racism racism, we shall have to find a new word for it. Clever, clever.
Yes, it’s lack of education and women’s empowerment that leads to more children (and using ‘less’ where one ought to use ‘fewer’), but the West is hardly being drowned out by ignorants from the emerging world. For one, the West selectively accepts only the most qualified from the emerging world. I dare say an Indian cardiologist or a Chinese programmer who immigrates to the West is a damn sight more useful than some backwater hick who just happened to be born inside its borders. Western society will not be doomed by the presence of people of colour. It will be doomed, if it is, by xenophobes who prefer to shut the borders and stew in their own mistaken sense of racial superiority.
What could possibly go wrong?
Bam Bam.
I can't remember that far back.
Supersmart? ... Probably not.
In essence the Neanderthal could have indeed been the one with the more brains or life experience or what you want to call it.
No. Lesser rate of reproduction in our time is only due to higher level of education and easy access of birth control. (Watch Hans Rosling's TED videos.) These are very recent sociological phenomena and are NOT applicable to the Neanderthals.
Why clone? In America there are plenty pretending to be fully developed humans.
Different species, eh?
All those anti cloning laws prohibit the cloning of humans, defined as Homo sapiens. Not Homo neanderthalensis, which while in the same genus is a different species. Athough there are arguments about this.. There is some evidence of interspecies breeding, which used to be the litmus test for species differentiation, but there's also (artificial) interbreeding of various Felis species (lions and tigers, for instance). And, there's no shared mitochondrial DNA between neandertals and humans, so interspecies offspring may not have been fertile (i.e. like mules)
I think the most accurate statement would be that this opens an enormous can of ethical and legal worms. Say you produce a neandertal infant.. is this a lab animal or what? It's clearly a primate.. but can it be "owned", for instance.
And using nuclear warheads against people in foreign countries is civil?
In our defense, we haven't done that in 56 years and there was a pretty strong precedent for the targeting of cities & civilian populations on all sides in that conflict (Dresden, Coventry, London, Tokyo, Kobe, etc.). In fact, the US generally favored precision bombing runs to the city killing incendiary/HE mixes, until early 1945 (Feb raid on Dresden).
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both legitimate targets, by the standards of the time.
From the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
At the time of its bombing, Hiroshima was a city of both industrial and military significance. A number of military camps were located nearby, including the headquarters of Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's 2nd General Army which commanded the defense of all southern Japan. Field Marshal Hata's 2nd General Army was headquartered in the Hiroshima Castle and his command consisted of some 400,000 men, most of whom were on Kyushu where an Allied invasion was correctly expected. Also present in Hiroshima was the headquarters of the 5th Division, 59th Army, and most of the 224th Division, a recently formed mobile unit.
The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials. The four largest companies in the city were Mitsubishi Shipyards, Electrical Shipyards, Arms Plant, and Steel and Arms Works, which employed almost as 90% of the city's labor force.
We killed more people and wiped out a larger area with the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9/10 March 1945. Now, that said, nuclear weapons are bad and so is firebombing civilian population centers. We try not to do either, anymore. In 1945/46, both were viewed as a legitimate method of waging war. We've grown up, now it's time you did.
Elton John found someone to carry his baby; how hard can it be?
This is one of those days I wish I had a uterus.
I just met you
and this is crazy
so here's my number
have my cave baby..
The ancient humans were smarter(not neccessarily technologically) than us. But that is because the world is only 6 thousand years old. People are becoming more and more physically and mentally decrepid. Human skeletons 12 ft tall have been found.
How many children are produced in the Western world? How many children are produced in the emerging world? Who is the less ignorant? BTW I use ignorant, and not less intelligent here. Drum roll, less children in western world, and less ignorant people in the western world. You could argue that the western world is being drowned out by ignorant emerging world people. The irony here is that as we become more knowleagable we produce less children, dooming our society so to speak. However, with enough generations that ignorance is removed.
Your argument (though a bit shallow) is entirely the reason why having porous and fair immigration policy is a good idea - if we attract the best and brightest, teach, and employ them, or if we attract the hardest working (i.e., undocumented workers are some of the hardest working folks in the USA), the country as a whole will prosper.
Closing the country's borders? Yeah, the society will age like Japan's did.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Let me illustrate, and PLEASE nobody call this racism.
Hah, you almost tricked me! That IS racism!
I'd be frightened of a Neanderthal. How about something a bit less intimidating?
Do we really want another neanderthal sucking up our tax dollars and getting free education & housing?
When Darwin published his work, the shock was NOT that Genesis wasn't true, they already knew that. The shock was that nature was nasty
There wasn't any such shock.
What do you mean "They" ? Less than 0.1 percent of the world's population was even interested. Of them, large proportion equated God and Nature. Story of Job proved that God could be nasty. So Nature being nasty is not even a surprise.
Anyone denied any privilege feels "life isn't fair". Just another way of saying God/Nature is nasty.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
That's the reverse of what I read in his post. He claims that if there were no immigration then solving ignorance would doom the country. He says that the immigrants are saving the western world. I feel he has a point.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Makes me think of Asimov's "The Ugly Little Boy".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy
Different species.
Not human races, ethnicities or societies (or any other groups within the same species).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
You would fit in so well at my workplace...
There's a Latin American Global Economic Model that essentially said the same thing. Their key indicators for economy were education and birthrate. If birthrate was high and educationw as low, there was a high correlation with a crap economy.
It's usually the bastards that win. So maybe Neanderthalers were too friendly for their own good..
We have thousands of Neanderthal in Fl, just pop on down and take your pick.
And one of the (many) idiotic things about that movie is the assumption that clever people don't give birth to idiots and that idiots don't give birth to clever people.
That movie is nothing more than a visualization on film of campus social bigotry.
Yes, most of us (excepting most Africans and Chinese) have Neanderthal genes in us.
Neither do Native Americans.
Guess what you white foks ARE! Neanderthals!
That does explain a lot about your culture.
With so many idiots spewing unborn souls into a hostile universe because they want a baby or they don't want to wear a condom, knowing full well these unborn souls never asked or consented to being brought into existence in the first place, and that they couldn't even marginally guarantee their children's happiness, and that all they're really willing to do is recite platitudes and point fingers once something goes horribly wrong, why does it not surprise me that some jackass is willing to artificially damn this unborn soul, a highly sentient being, to his expiriment which
A) Could / probably will result in horrific developmental and birth defects
B) Even if it goes perfectly to plan will leave this being feeling alienated, gawked at, and probably profoundly depressed their entire lives
People need to go. Maybe the next species to evolve higher level cortical function won't shit on every single thing they can oblivious to the concerns of every sentient being but themselves, but I doubt it.
To paraphrase an interesting line, "What would humans do to make the Martian landscape more interesting? Add a Walmart?"
Humanity: Grade: F, Unacceptable
Let me illustrate, and PLEASE nobody call this racism.
I'll just call it nonsense then.
This is oddly reminiscent of a short story called 'The Ugly Little Boy' by Isaac Asimov. Truly a man beyond his time.
I don't think that most animals care much about eating their own species when they get really hungry. That does make humans rather poor hunters, doesn't it? :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
You could argue that the western world is being drowned out by ignorant emerging world people. The irony here is that as we become more knowleagable we produce less children, dooming our society so to speak.
Sounds like Idiocracy??
I don't use those devices to post to slashdot but I see it as a futile and annoying exercise for people to play teacher and correct the mistakes of those that do. Blaming me for a general situation that I mentioned but am not part of reveals that you are not paying much attention to what you are reading - so please fix your reading comprehension skills before playing teacher (or it's much better if people don't use their pride in their spelling bee win to think they get to correct everyone else on this casual site).
This is awesome. This is a truly wondrous and wonderful thing. The fact that the interview took place in Germany and not the US speaks volumes about the predicted reaction within the US. The US has a choice. GTFU WRT to science and ignore your evangelical / fundamentalist loudmouths or slowly but surely become a second rate scientific nation.
BTW, what is the difference between "the smartest" and "the brightest"?
Sheldon Cooper vs Jason Bourne?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy
A correlation between what you call "ignorance" and population growth may be demonstrable, but this does not demonstrate a causal or real correlation. Hence it cannot be proven that "as we become more knowledgeable we produce less children" (which, by the way, should be "fewer children"). It would be more fruitful to surmise that some real correlation exists between the present motion of Western culture in its present direction and the decline in births. This culture is not wholly separate from our growth in scientific knowledge, but it cannot be proven by mere statistics that this scientific knowledge itself is the cause of the decline in child bearing. Merely pointing to scientific advances in contraceptive measures does not establish this point, either, because it is still necessary for the culture to desire to use these measures that science has developed. (This is analogous to the fact most often contraceptives do not actually achieve their theoretical efficacy in prevention because of faulty use by impassioned lovers.) In other words, intelligence is not what pushes Western society to thin its growth; culture is.
But this is further complicated by problems in the basic distinction between the Western 'intelligent' world and the 'emerging world.' Our assumptions, based on Eurocentric and U.S.-centric biases and present political and cultural dominance, make us assume that this part of the world is somehow more intelligent as a rule. Yet the possible genetic gap between homo sapiens and neanderthal that may have established a measurable gap in intelligence does not hold between the current varieties of humanity, such that the current scientific dominance of the so-called "first world" is not due to some genetic superiority. The multiplicity of Indian doctors and scholars, who come from a culture marked by a vast population, cast doubt on the claim that intelligence and lack of children correlate causally. On the other hand, much of what we consider 'intelligence,' in fact, is already judged according to Western standards that are designed from the outset to exclude other peoples and other histories, in order to deny their intelligence before they open their mouths. Simply because their thought does not always take the forms cherished by Western rationalism does not mean that they are actually unintelligent.
I don't at all mean to accuse you of racism, but I do think that your theory could benefit from some in-depth analysis and postcolonial thinking.
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
Fucking them puts wool on your chest! :-D
Let me illustrate, and PLEASE nobody call this racism
Hans Rosling does a much better job than you at illustrating it. He also completely disproves your fears.
www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html
it's in my head
Actually humans are very formidable hunters for one simple reason: Virtually all predators on land will have to break off and try again after resting if their initial attack fails. Humans just shrug and set out at a comfortable jog after the one that got away and try poking it with a stick, and then when it runs off that time we'll keep following it again. And again. And again. And again, over and over until we've either killed it directly or until whatever we're hunting is simply too tired to move anymore.
We're pretty much the only species capable of that kind of sustained physical activity, almost everybody else is stronger or faster only in short bursts.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Didn't anyone at Harvard read Jurssic Park, or see the movie? Those idiots are so sure determined to see if they could that they don't stop to ask if they should!