That’s why we should clone not just one, but whole groups of Neanderthals. And then give them some living space in Alaska, where they can hunt moose, and nice, Jane Goodall-like ladies can study them.

Then after a few generations we can clone some Cro-Mags and send them in and see what happens.

It’s not cloning that is a main barrier (although it is a formidable one). It’s that the replacement in the genome are done by homologous recombination – which isn’t very efficient in mammals and takes long time and low frequency to select for. So when the task is to make 20,000 mutations, the existing techniques cannot offer anything realistic.

One never knows how the future will see things.Beliefs are not frozen in place.I can easily see the pendulum swinging the other way on sterilization in the future.

A ‘vibrant’ community of violent Neanderthals living in the midst of weak, domesticated sapiens may be the last thing that is needed. I don’t even want to think about the accusations of racism coming from liberals, that only my fellow sapiens will have to endure, in spite of their physical weaknesses.

One never knows how the future will see things.Beliefs are not frozen in frozen in place.I can easily see the pendulum swinging the other on sterilization in the future.

Decades ago, Heinlein wrote a plausible short about a genetically modified chimp of a kind used for scut labor being legally declared a man. The court proceedings were frighteningly logical and, in today’s society, probably inevitable. After all, we’ve called him H. Neanderthal. See, “H”. Man. Hardly necessary to provide any more evidence.

We are told that Neanderthals, at least the men, were probably more violent than H. Sap. The deduction has to do with finger-length ratios as proxies for testosterone levels. H. Neander are, according to anatomists’ assertions, hugely powerful, short, with short limbs. In judo and wrestling, short and stocky is a bitch to fight. How would things go on the playground?

If he’s a “man”, you can’t keep him in a cage, even if the grant includes lifetime financial support.

He’s not likely to be comfortable or competent in today’s society, it being designed by his successor after, say, forty thousand years, since he and his kind had two hundred thousand years or whatever it is and got more or less nowhere.

If you clone the guy and then have to institutionalize him, that’s about as vile as can be. The supermax prisons drive prisoners mad due to confinement and isolation, yet they are necessary in some cases to protect the guards and other prisoners. And in this supposed case, what did he do wrong?

Prisons are full of guys with overaggressive tendencies whose physical capacities allow them to do great damage to others. And so they have. Seems a bad idea to bring a sentient being into a situation where this is his likely end when we don’t have to.

Other than some guys who are too salty about their ability with the test tubes and have no further thought, I can’t see a single reason for this.

Morally reprehensible.

And what for? A freak show?

Richard Aubrey

ReplyReply AllMove…InboxAOL_MailSaved_on_AOL

An argument can be made that Neanderthal and human are so close as to make no difference in this respect, but I think that’s an assumption that we don’t know enough to be able to make. There have been some significant population dynamic changes that have affected our genomes since Neanderthal and humans interbred (population-specific, of course), so I don’t know what effect those may have had upon the ability of a mostly Neanderthal genome to successfully develop from a human fertilized oocyte. It would depend in part on how successful the breeding efforts were originally between Neanderthal and human, I would think. Was it easy for cross-breeding to occur? The proportion of our genomes suggest that it may have been, but there are other explanations rather than ease of cross-breeding that could explain the proportion of Neanderthal genome that remains in the modern human genome.

All of this doesn’t address the draft quality Neanderthal genome that we have available to work with at this time. I’d be leery of cloning any ancient species without more samples from which to compare and try to parse out the most complete picture of the genome. Svante Paabo did an amazing job, obviously, and the best job to date on ancient DNA, but there’s only so much that one can do with ancient DNA. The damage can cause some really significant problems in sequence interpretation, and there are some rather large gaps that could be very significant for the species. We also know very little about duplications, which can be a very significant issue, particularly relevant for GPCRs and thus sensory perception. If we did try to clone a Neanderthal at this point, we’d wind up merely with a hybrid that was a bit closer to what we THINK a Neanderthal is than we are, but that’s the best we could hope for, biologically.

I’d like to think a cloned neandertal could live a life within the normal range of moderns, but there a number of circumstances in which they could be cloned, some good and some bad.

All I’m certain of is that if a neandertal is cloned a modern will be having sex with one.

If we could resurrect the Neanderthals as a species through cloning, I think that we should do it and raise the clones as members of modern human society, instead of trying to force them to be relics. If there would be limits to their ability to be part of modern human society, then special arrangements should be made and perhaps eventually a new Neanderthal culture could emerge.

Personally, I think that member of any species of the genus Homo would be legally human. The similarity with Homo sapiens would be too great to deny the status of humans to them. Australopithecines might be tricky, but not Neanderthals.

And if they’re not legally human, you’d have created an individual with a human (or almost human) capacity to suffer, but no rights. Which might actually be useful for certain evil military/slave labour applications… Imagine Neanderthal shock troops who can’t be tried for war crimes.

No, you couldn’t. Few of them – sure. But not all of them. Not with the current technology or any technology envisioned today.

I can easily imagine that once it become possible for parents to select which chromosomes a child will inherit (and more so when we can individually select genes) that some of the ‘mixed-race’ Tasmanians may possibly purposefully select the chromosomes with the most ‘Tasmanian’ admixture in them. I can imagine some similar decision-making happening in some American Indians from the United States.

Other parents may want to make sure that their children are as as admixed as possible (as in the differences between the ancient mixed population in Central Asia (name?) and American Blacks) to ensure that they are a ‘true blend of their parent’s love!’, or perhaps that they inherit specific traits from each parent. And some parents will want their children to inherit the most unique genes that each of them have, which might lead to some interesting changes in gene frequencies.

In any case, as long as the children grow up in loving homes the way that all children should, such tampering would certainly be ethical…..if for no other reason than that the parents are already making decisions about their child’s future just by the fact that they have a child – picking chromosomes or genes is merely fine-tuning.

http://variety-sf.blogspot.ca/2008/03/e-van-vogt-monster-aka-resurrection.html

Neanderthals with cat eyes will take over the world!

So we’d have just gone and made us some more mathematicians and theoretical physicists?

I’m aware of the history of sterilization during the “progressive” era, including in the U.S. That said, those days are behind us, and that type of eugenics is viewed with horror by even the majority of genetic determinists today.

In addition, the logic of the era was stupid regarding these matters, as Darwinian fitness merely means the number of viable children you can ensure reach adulthood. If the “feeble-minded” really did out-reproduce, then they were more fit.

Similarly, I’m not sure how you could argue, in terms of genetics, a Neanderthal should be sterilized to prevent interbreeding. First, they already interbred with “us” once. Second, as Razib noted, the vast majority of their genome would be culled from the Neanderthal portions of our own DNA. I have a feeling this would need to be patched a bit with reconstructed fossil DNA as well – I can’t imagine that 100% of Neanderthal genes survived, when non-Africans only share around 2%-4% of their genes, and some appear to have been highly selected for. If the reconstructed Neanderthal’s genome combination was a selective advantage, I don’t see any reason why we should’t stop it spreading far and wide.

Regardless, I presume muhr was arguing for special treatment of Neanderthals due to their “not being human” – and he wouldn’t advocate for sterilizing human beings. Attitudes like his are probably the best argument in these comments for why we shouldn’t resurrect the subspecies. I think it’s fine to create experimental humans through genetic engineering, provided it’s understood that, once they are born, they are humans with the same human rights as the rest of us, including the right to refuse to participate further study if they so wish.

A related question to the skeptics. Consider Tasmanians. They were completely extinguished as a full-blooded people culture in the 19th century. Virtually nothing remains of their history, language or culture. However, a mixed-race community exists at least on Bass Island, and possibly on other nearby islands as well. It would be far easier to reconstruct the Tasmanian aborigines than Neanderthals, as the admixture is recent enough that most of the genome of the aboriginal ancestors is probably still in existence. Would this be ethical?