Rebuilt DNA Could Lead to Cloned Neanderthals

[grumbler]

Anything with Homo in it's species name gets human rights.

I don't believe you will find any evidence that this is true.  If it were to go to a court of law, I would bet on the requirement being that the species be homo sapiens, and that other species within the genus homo would qualify only on a case-by-case basis (though, of course, it is entirely unclear as to whether Neanderthal is of the species homo sapiens or not).

Morality on this issue, I think, should be determined by whether the person would be capable of being human. If the Neanderthal would be a mere curiosity or "programmed" to fail then creating this person would be unethical.

I think that, morally, the motives for creating such a being would determine whether it is the right thing to do or not.  Simply creating a person (or potential person) for the sake of curiosity wouldn't be moral even if the child were as mentally and physically adept as any other person.

[HVC]

2) Cultural evolution. It is not genetic or morphological. It is cultural. We should be able to take a Homo Sapiens from most of the period of the speicies and raise it as a modern human. Neanderthal is different both genetically and morphologically.

Cultural norms are not evolutionary, but the ability to work in large groups surely is. I mean there are reasons why some animals are social, and others aren't. Alfreds clone may not have the capacity to effectively co-exist in a larger group.

[Viking]

The definition of Homo is found by inferring certain mental traits from produced artefacts combined with a Homonid body. Yes, we might be separated by 18 thousand generations but still scientifically we are all homo. Regardless that courts are hearing cases where Pan Troglodytes (chimps for you creationist science haters) is argued as having human rights, what a court says is irrelevant to morality and ethics. It is merely relevant to the law. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/01/austria.animalwelfare (I'd link to the nature article if you could read it).

Regarding morality and pregnancy, I suppose with your standards any of the real reasons people get pregnant would also be immoral. Acts that can be undone are held to different standards to acts that cannot be undone in all cases. A mentally capable (in the sense of being capable of functioning in modern society) person could leave the wacko scientists that created him/her and conceivably move on to create a life for himself, a mentally non-capable person could not.

H. Neandertalis might fall into the cracks between being not capable of human deeds and still having human rights. If such a person is the likely result of such cloning it should not be done, go clone a dire wolf, terror bird of a mastodon instead, I have no problems with that.

[Viking]

2) Cultural evolution. It is not genetic or morphological. It is cultural. We should be able to take a Homo Sapiens from most of the period of the speicies and raise it as a modern human. Neanderthal is different both genetically and morphologically.

Cultural norms are not evolutionary, but the ability to work in large groups surely is. I mean there are reasons why some animals are social, and others aren't. Alfreds clone may not have the capacity to effectively co-exist in a larger group.

Cultural norms are not biological. We have clearly genetically modern Homo Sapiens living stone age hunter gatherer lives in tribes all over the world. They do not have the cultural baggage to deal with the modern world. They have the same brain and neurons we have, but they have different culture. Cultural evolution is the transmission of slightly modified ideas from generation to generation. Richard Dawkins (when he was still a research scientist) named such ideas memes.

A less than modern Homo Sapiens, if raised by modern Homo Sapiens in a modern society would have the culture of that moderns society and not be more deficient in being able to adopt the modern culture and it's norms than many modern homo sapiens. Or, this, at least, is what Anthropologists agree is most likely the case.

[HVC]

I wouldn't presume to know more then anthropologists, but I can see where older man wouldn't have the genes to interact in large groups. As an example cats, who have been domesticated for about 9000 years, are social creatures. Even feral cats form colonies. But wildcat, the domestic cats forbearer, is purely solitary and I doubt very much that it react well to being placed in a social environment (feline, human, or other).

[Viking]

I wouldn't presume to know more then anthropologists, but I can see where older man wouldn't have the genes to interact in large groups. As an example cats, who have been domesticated for about 9000 years, are social creatures. Even feral cats form colonies. But wildcat, the domestic cats forbearer, is purely solitary and I doubt very much that it react well to being placed in a social environment (feline, human, or other).

I don't know about cats, but wild foxes were domesticated within 50 years under scientifically observed conditions, selecting for behavioural characteristics trying to breed a more friendly fur fox.

http://cbsu.tc.cornell.edu/ccgr/behaviour/Index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
http://8e.devbio.com/article.php?id=223

Social animals are easier to domesticate and herd (goats, cattle, sheep and dogs) while some kinds of animals could have been "domesticated" by means of toleration (pigs living off our leftovers, cats eating the rats and mice stealing our food).

Dogs were probably domesticated very quickly from wolves (a few hundred years) as the link to the russian foxes above

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_domestic_dog

But, regardless, we need to be concious of the difference between ability to be social, the ability to social back and the willingness to be both.

[alfred russel]

I don't know that. The scientific consensus does suppose that, with good reason of course. Thats why I used the word should. The reason we consider all 200,000 years of humans to be humans are the consistency of the traits identifying the species, these include brain architecture.

There isn't a scientific consensus. There are some scientists who believe evolution has accelerated the last 10,000 years, and those that believe it has not been a major factor.

Language is a great example. There is a lot of thought that we are predisposed to learn languages at a young age, but then there is not a consensus that homo sapiens evolved with language skills in place. That certainly opens the possibility of critical evolution happening after the species was established. We also know that over the last 10,000 years there was significant evolution regarding disease resistance. Skin color has also differentiated. I don't think you can definatively say that significant changes haven't taken place.

[jimmy olsen]

Anything with Homo in it's species name gets human rights. Morality on this issue, I think, should be determined by whether the person would be capable of being human. If the Neanderthal would be a mere curiosity or "programmed" to fail then creating this person would be unethical.

What would be interesting is a clone of a person from 10-15,000 years ago. Would the person behaviorally be able to cope with civilization, or have we silently evolved since the agricultural revolution to cope with societies more complex than hunter gatherers?

1) Homo Neanderthalis is NOT our ancestor. The last common ancestor we have with them is during one of the Erectus emigrations from Africa or Heidelbergensis, this places our last common ancestor around 300 to 600 thousand years ago.

2) Cultural evolution. It is not genetic or morphological. It is cultural. We should be able to take a Homo Sapiens from most of the period of the speicies and raise it as a modern human. Neanderthal is different both genetically and morphologically.

Neanderthalis separates from us about 1/20th of the distance between us and Afarensis (Lucy) and seems to be significantly different from us not only culturally but also in the brain functions that allow cultural adaptation (since we lived in contact for about 50 thousand years in europe before they went extinct), they did not learn from us, they did not adopt culture or technology from Sapiens. They kept their own technology unchanged throughout their existence.

If we did clone one I suspect he or she (not it) would appear to us to be a heavy set mentally handicapped stable and capable of simple tasks person. He or she would learn language and would being able to do what he or she were taught, but might not be able to understand the concepts "red" or "hope".

A lot of this is out of date due to research in the last 10 years, I'll post on this in detail once I get to work.

[alfred russel]

Viking, you should check out this book:

http://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accelerated/dp/0465002218/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&sr=8-1

Editorial Reviews - The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

From Publishers Weekly
Arguing that human genetic evolution is still ongoing, physicist-turned-evolutionary biologist Cochran and anthropologist Harpending marshal evidence for dramatic genetic change in the (geologically) recent past, particularly since the invention of agriculture. Unfortunately, much of their argument-including the origin of modern humans, agriculture, and Indo-Europeans-tends to neglect archaeological and geological evidence; readers should keep in mind that assumed time frames, like the age of the human species, are minimums at best and serious underestimates at worst. That said, there is much here to recommend, including the authors' unique approach to the question of modern human-Neanderthal interbreeding, and their discussion of the genetic pressures on Ashkenazi Jews over the past 1,000 years, both based solidly in fact. They also provide clear explanations for tricky concepts like gene flow and haplotypes, and their arguments are intriguing throughout. Though lapses in their case won't be obvious to the untrained eye, it's clear that this lively, informative text is not meant to deceive (abundant references and a glossary also help) but to provoke thought, debate and possibly wonder.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Cochran and Harpending dispute the late Stephen Jay Gould's assertion that civilization was "built with the same body and brain" Homo sapiens has had for 40,000 years. Humanity has been evolving very dramatically for the last 10,000 years, they say, spurred by the very civilizational forces launched by that evolution. They initially retreat, however, to Gould's 40,000-year benchmark to consider how H. sapiens replaced H. neanderthalensis and to argue for genetic mixing such that modern humans got from Neanderthals the innovative capacity for civilization. Later, agricultural life created problems necessitating adaptations, most importantly to disease and diet, that persist to this day among inheritors of the populations that made them. Lighter skin and eye color arose from other genetic reactions to environmental challenges, and less immediately obvious changes further discriminated discrete populations, as recently as late-eighteenth-century Ashkenazi Jews, among whom intelligence burgeoned in, Cochran and Harpending contend, adaptive response to social pressure. A most intriguing deposition, without a trace of ethnic or racial advocacy, though directed against the proposition that "we're all the same." --Ray Olson

[Malthus]

Cloned Neanderthals?

Isn't offering football scholarships easier?

[jimmy olsen]

2) Cultural evolution. It is not genetic or morphological. It is cultural. We should be able to take a Homo Sapiens from most of the period of the speicies and raise it as a modern human. Neanderthal is different both genetically and morphologically.

Cultural norms are not evolutionary, but the ability to work in large groups surely is. I mean there are reasons why some animals are social, and others aren't. Alfreds clone may not have the capacity to effectively co-exist in a larger group.

Cultural norms are not biological. We have clearly genetically modern Homo Sapiens living stone age hunter gatherer lives in tribes all over the world. They do not have the cultural baggage to deal with the modern world. They have the same brain and neurons we have, but they have different culture. Cultural evolution is the transmission of slightly modified ideas from generation to generation. Richard Dawkins (when he was still a research scientist) named such ideas memes.

A less than modern Homo Sapiens, if raised by modern Homo Sapiens in a modern society would have the culture of that moderns society and not be more deficient in being able to adopt the modern culture and it's norms than many modern homo sapiens. Or, this, at least, is what Anthropologists agree is most likely the case.

Well for a long time anthropologists have believed that there was a cultural explosion around 50,000 years ago and that there must have been some kind of change in the brain that accounted for the appearance of art and other evidence of symbolic thought.

However there have been recent discoveries of art that's older than that, but it's unclear whether these are merely isolated cases or our discoveries have been limited by age and the fragility of most kinds of art.

[Viking]

I am aware of the idea of accelerated human evolution during the past 10,000 years. I don't disagree or have any issue with that. I suspect that if we clearly state our understanding of the facts we'll find out we are agreeing. So to the clarification.

I used the phrase "less than modern homo sapiens" in the sense of "earlier than modern", I did this for a reason. I was not comparing "early" or "middle" or "ancient". I was suggesting that the homo sapiens from before civilisation are the same as the homo sapiens after civilisation. Naturally disease and changed life habits will change immune and body shape. We had been talking about mental capabilities and that was the change (or lack of change) I was referring to. We don't see modern hunter gatherer societies full of retards or stupid people or socially inept people. These are groups who have separated off from the main genetic stem of humanity as long ago as 40,000 years ago (for the australian aboriginies). This is at least 30,000 years before the first proposed agricultural societies.

I like the way that the review alfred russel includes the phrase "Though lapses in their case won't be obivous to the untrained eye....". That is correct, there is a scientific debate going on about this issue. I hope you have noticed the qualifiers I have been using throughout this thread.

Pre-Modern (now I'm talking about modern society, rather than modern homo sapiens) agricultural societies probably had a very intense selective pressure. New diseases, war and new forms of selection (think ghengis kahn and his decendents) probably had a great effect. So there has been change. These are the changes that they suggest.

We were talking about mental capability. Has there been a change in mental capability from pre-modern homo sapiens to us? We don't have solid evidence for that. If there is a change is that change genetic? We don't have evidence for that. What evidence we do have for mental capability, the skulls of pre-modern and the artifacts of pre-modern homo sapiens, does not suggest nor support any assertion that they were less mentally capable that we are.

Real changes did happen including immunity to disease, weeding out of traits inconsistent with civilisation (the ones needed for hunting and fighting) and other changes.

[Viking]

Well for a long time anthropologists have believed that there was a cultural explosion around 50,000 years ago and that there must have been some kind of change in the brain that accounted for the appearance of art and other evidence of symbolic thought.

However there have been recent discoveries of art that's older than that, but it's unclear whether these are merely isolated cases or our discoveries have been limited by age and the fragility of most kinds of art.

I agree. The clearest trait separating Homo Sapiens from previous Homo is the constant change in tools, weapons and art. I'm not going to propose a date for the beginning of cultural evolution, but just point out that Homo Sapiens culture changes, the culture of the other Homo doesn't. 

[Caliga]

I think we should clone a Neanderthal chick.  AFAIK they always had huge cans. 

[alfred russel]

Viking--I'm just contesting the idea that there is a scientific consensus. Some of the few characteristics we can trace the past 10,000 years we know have changed. Although humans have been separated for extended periods, the only large group without knowledge of agriculture is the australian aborigines, and a couple centuries beyond first contact I don't know what they prove, if anything.

If there were genetically based behavoral (or other types of mental) changes, I don't know why you would expect to see them in skulls--we don't see a skull change with increased language capability, for example.