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Should We Clone a Neanderthal?
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Nov 25, 2008 01:46 AM
from the they-are-among-us dept.
from the they-are-among-us dept.
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."
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Most of Woolly Mammoth Genome Reconstructed 245 comments
geekmansworld writes "From the Washington Post, 'An international team of scientists has reconstructed more than three-quarters of the genome of the woolly mammoth using DNA extracted from balls of hair, the first time this has been accomplished for an extinct species.' Who wants a pet mammoth?"
[+]
Resurrecting the Mighty Mammoth, Cheaply 322 comments
somanyrobots writes with an interesting followup in the New York Times to the earlier-reported substantial reconstruction of the woolly mammoth genome: "Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million. The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years, the effective age limit for DNA." (The Washington Post article linked from the earlier post was much more skeptical, calling such an attempt "still firmly the domain of science fiction." The New York Times article, while describing the process in similar terms, also calls attention to recent advances in sequencing DNA, as well as recoding DNA for cloning.)
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Yes, because they would make (Score:5, Funny)
Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Cause then it would no longer be socially acceptable for women to call us that anymore.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
The jokes are funnier if I don't have to explain them.
Parent
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
What if its worse? What if they're smarter?
Parent
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
I for one welcome our previously extinct smarter overlords.
Parent
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
What if it turns out they are just like us?
I wouldn't worry about that too much. At this very moment, there are several millions of Neanderthals among us, both male and female [somethingawful.com].
CJ
Parent
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Given the boyfriends my ex has been through in the past couple of years, I think nobody might be a bit strong.
Parent
Geico (Score:5, Funny)
Well, arguably not... (Score:5, Interesting)
Could be (quite the role-reversal?) that they were the thoughtful ones, and we were just meaner.
Who knows? We don't.
Re:Well, arguably not... (Score:5, Informative)
If having a bigger brain was the ultimate measure of intelligence, then elephants would be geniuses [natureinstitute.org]
In fact, brain size does not matter in humans [netcom.com] either. It's just an old wise tale carried over from the 19th century that still haunts us today (as seen here).
Parent
Clone 'em??? (Score:5, Funny)
Well (Score:5, Funny)
Religious point of view (Score:5, Funny)
Housing, Nursery, or a Zoo? (Score:5, Interesting)
Housing, Nursery, or a Zoo?
I think that may become the biggest obstacle.
When that is decided, should we let him/her go to school and socialize or should we let keep him locked up for study.
What? (Score:5, Funny)
That's like asking "Should I flash linux onto the Microwave so I can use it as a file server?" or "Should I port Doom to the Credit-card reader I bought off eBay?" or "Should I build a deliberately complicated system of relays, pulleys, levers, programs and scripts so that I may control the precise movements and power output by a bog-standard toaster remotely, from 500 miles away?". I mean, really, do you have to ask? Of course we fucking should!
Evolution (Score:5, Funny)
This has been on my mind for a few years ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The DNA we have extracted from mammoth hair is from two individual mammoths who died between twenty and sixty thousand years ago. The supposed limit of DNA viability is roughly sixty thousand years. H. neanderthalensis went extinct less than fifteen thousand years ago. H. florensis is thought to have been around as recently as the past thirteen thousand years. I'd say we stand a good chance of recovering genetic material from either, or both of these species.
Should we bring these species out of evolutionary retirement? It's a dilemma:
1. How badly do scientists want to cheese off the world's major religions? I am ambivalent towards this. Ya know, some of the self-righteous pious freaks we have walking around spouting nonsense today deserve a swift kick in the nads. Still, is it worth the potential backlash?
2. Is this ethically justifiable? What could we do with a living genome that we could not do with that genome in a comparative study? How will we justify the potential gain in knowledge versus the rights of the resultant being when he or she is carried to term, reared, and socialized? Will he or she have full rights? Will he or she be able to be valued within society? Is some loony with a gun going to go "big game hunting" or "abominatinon-killing"?
3. Someone else in the comments discussed dealing with this individual if he or she is significantly psychologically and mentally different from us. What can we offer such an individual besides life in a high tech zoo?
4. Some things will be forever beyond us. We'll never hear true Neanderthal language, we'll never observe untainted Neanderthal culture, and a feral child experiment with any of the homo genus we'd be capable of bring back is pretty much unconscionable [wikipedia.org]. Are we looking for answers where there are none?
I guess it comes down to what we can learn versus the risks. I think the one thing we might be able to learn from h. neanderthalensis is how we as a species look to an outside observer. Do we really want them to look us in the eyes and tell us what they see?
I'm not certain we're prepared for it.
-Joe
RIP, Phil Hartman (Score:5, Funny)
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'm just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW.. and run off into the hills, or wherever.. Sometimes when I get a message on my fax machine, I wonder: "Did little demons get inside and type it?" I don't know! My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts. But there is one thing I do know - when a man like my client slips and falls on a sidewalk in front of a public library, then he is entitled to no less than two million in compensatory damages, and two million in punitive damages. Thank you.
Re:"The Dead Will Rise" (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:NO (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, it's slippery-slope man!
Parent
Re:Not animals (Score:5, Informative)
They are not Homo Sapiens.
They are Homo neandertalinis.
Look it up!
And furthermore, humans are animals. So "not animals" only applies to plant life.
Parent
Re:Not animals (Score:5, Informative)
Neanderthals are considered to be part of the Homo Sapiens species. Wouldn't the concerns (and legalities) be the same as any human cloning project?
We both belong to the Homo genus [wikipedia.org], but Neanderthals are H. neanderthalensis, while we are H. sapiens.
Though here's an interesting paragraph on the Neanderthal page [wikipedia.org] that I didn't know before I browsed around on Wikipedia:
For some time, professionals debated whether Neanderthals should be classified as Homo neanderthalensis or as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, the latter placing Neanderthals as a subspecies of Homo sapiens. Genetic statistical calculation (2006 results) suggests at least 5% of the modern human gene pool can be attributed to ancient admixture, with the European contribution being from the Neanderthal.[10] Some morphological studies support that Homo neanderthalensis is a separate species and not a subspecies. [11] Some suggest inherited admixture. Others, for example University of Cambridge Professor Paul Mellars, say "no evidence has been found of cultural interaction"[12] and evidence from mitochondrial DNA studies have been interpreted as evidence Neanderthals were not a subspecies of H. sapiens.[13] Homo sapiens mtDNA from Australia (Mungo Man 40ky ) is also not found in recent human genomic pool and mtDNA sequences for temporally comparative African specimens are not yet available.
Parent
Re:queue... (Score:5, Funny)
Geico would make an Obscene CLone Fall
Parent