Cloning a Neandertal

[Chief_Pedant]

@drastic_quench

I’d wager he could get a business degree from a state college (and might even surprise us and rape fewer women than his peers).

The ethical dilemma arises if you lose the wager, and despite your bravado, you do not know whether or not you would win it. That’s why it’s an ethical dilemma.

I think it is naive to think we would process this individual the way we process defectively-behaving (regular) humans. Not a chance. We have a process in place to deal with lawbreakers and assholes; another process in place for people we think are mentally defective and can’t help their behavior. The first we imprison; the second we institutionalize. Neither tend to be especially content. Both are products of reproductive couplings we cannot control. Within our own populations, we do not typically control who gets to procreate, and whether or not they should be procreating. (Octomom, anyone?) If Neandertal behaves badly, we cage him up, and there is no such thing as due process. He cannot be held to a standard of law.

Creation of a Neandertal is qualitatively different from procreating ourselves. We know in advance that we are not creating our own population–our own subspecies going back 200K years. Therefore, if such a being ends up being wretched, it’s not some accidental variation secondary to ungovernable procreative urges. It’s a being whose misfit-ness might be exactly due to his fundamental nature. If that misfit-ness does occur, we who created him knowing that his gene pool was substantially variant, and at the same time knowing it was close enough to ours to make him seem like one of us, are responsible for him. We are his Masters. We are his Creator in a much different sense of just being his biological parents. And therefore we are responsible for any misery that arises, and responsible to make a decision whether or not to euthanize him he turns out to be miserable. Since I wouldn’t euthanize an individual so close to my own kind, I don’t want to create him in the first place.

If John Mace creates him, I’d hold John Mace personally responsible for the Neandertal’s personal contented-ness and behaviour in a much different way than I’d hold John Mace personally responsible for having a kid who is a jerk or who is unhappy.

[Chief_Pedant]

@iiandyiiii

Why on earth not? Neanderthals lived in groups and took care of their sick and injured. They must have had some of the same basic societal taboos against murder and casual violence that modern hunter-gatherers do just to survive in groups, so we know they’re capable of not murdering or exploding in random violence on a whim.

Fine, so don’t enslave him. No slavery. He’ll have the same rights as any of us. There’s no legal way for a person to be born in America without these rights.

They aren’t “new digs”- they’ll be the only “digs” he’s ever seen or known. He won’t be adapting, any more then every baby has to adapt to the world outside the womb.

I find it difficult to believe that, however different a Neanderthal may be, he won’t be within the spectrum of human behavior that we as a species have already seen. There’s nothing he could do that hasn’t been topped by some human at some time. However dangerous he might possibly be, there have been more dangerous homo sapiens. However smart or stupid, there have been smarter or stupider homo sapiens. However unable to grasp language or writing, there have been homo sapiens with even weaker grasps. Except for, possibly, anatomical things like physical strength, there isn’t a human capacity that he won’t fall somewhere on the spectrum of people that have already lived among us.

I venture to say that a chimpanzee’s behaviour probably falls within the spectrum of human behaviour too. This is not a sufficient criterion to decide to treat them the way we treat our own human population. (So that I don’t have to keep repeating it, I’ll clarify that I’m talking about the human population at roughly mtDNA haplogroup L timelines on down.)

There is no chance Neandertal will be treated the way we treat fully modern humans. He will not be held to that standard. He’s human, but he’s not one of us. We have no idea if we can raise him to fit in or not, but if he doesn’t fit in, there’s no chance he gets legal due process for shoplifting any more than a chimp does. He gets caged up in some way, and that’s why he’s a slave. If he doesn’t do what we, his masters, expect, we bind him. We will have no idea if he can “help” his behaviour or not. (We’re not even sure if we can help our own behaviour, but at least we’ve already decided how to muddle through that dilemma for our own population)

[DSeid]

@Chief_Pedant

… We have a process in place to deal with lawbreakers and assholes; another process in place for people we think are mentally defective and can’t help their behavior. …

And let’s make this very clear: if Neandy doesn’t work out it is not because (s)he is an asshole or mentally defective. Neandy could be a perfectly normal intelligent Neandertal living and growing up in what is for a Neandertal a very defective crazy world. Punishing him/her for that would be wrong; treating him/her as mentally defective or mentally ill would also be incorrect.

Even homo sapiens sapiens has evolved over the past 20 to 30,000 years. I’m not completely confident a cloned archaic hss would be a low enough risk proposition. What subtle brain changes have occured that selected for being able to exist in our sorts of population densities? What co-evolution with our gut bacteria have occurred? Sure, being lactose intolerant and having a hard time digesting wheat is predictable enough, but what other adaptations to the world we have created have occurred just in our own species over the last 30K years? We do not know and there would be risk to the individual emergent of that ignorance. Risk the individual takes on to satisfy our selfish need to have questions answered.

[DSeid]

Following up on that last bit is this:

… positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone — around the period of the Stone Age — has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution. Many of the new genetic adjustments are occurring around changes in the human diet brought on by the advent of agriculture, and resistance to epidemic diseases that became major killers after the growth of human civilizations.

“In evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations,” says Hawks. “And every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. What we are catching is an exceptional time.” …

[John_Mace]

I think satisfying our Neanderthal’s dietary needs would be one of the simplest problems to solve. A diet that most nutritionists would consider wonderful for all of us would work great (ie, no to minimal processed foods) albeit perhaps skewed more towards the high meat content end of the spectrum.

We have populations of modern humans that have never been subject to the selective pressures of living in high density, urban environments. I would not worry about a baby from such a population being able to live as the adoptive child of a typical American family.

[Grim_Render]

I am not sure why everyone assumes there would be only one Neanderthal. I’d assume we’d do a small peer group and raise them together, semi-isolated from Sapiens children. Make the decisions on whether to let them mingle freely when we see what they are like behaviorally.

Anyway, hypothetically: If it turns out that we as a species wiped them out or were heavily involved in their extinction, do we as a species have some kind of ethical duty to attempt to undo that?

[Chief_Pedant]

@Grim_Render

I am not sure why everyone assumes there would be only one Neanderthal. I’d assume we’d do a small peer group and raise them together, semi-isolated from Sapiens children. Make the decisions on whether to let them mingle freely when we see what they are like behaviorally.

Anyway, hypothetically: If it turns out that we as a species wiped them out or were heavily involved in their extinction, do we as a species have some kind of ethical duty to attempt to undo that?

We can’t even find land for Palestinians; I’m not sure we can find it for a group of Neandertals. Plus, do you do some sort condor thing, raising them so they never knew who actually raised them, and then acclimatizing them somehow? If that were possible, it would assuage some of my concerns. I just don’t think it’s realistic, though. Jurassic Park and all that…

We have no moral obligation to undo what our ancestors did 40,000 years ago. Where would that sort of reasoning end up? We gonna give the earth back to all the species we’ve bumped off? We can’t even control our own populations enough to slow down chewing through the earth right now.

[Grim_Render]

@Chief_Pedant

We can’t even find land for Palestinians; I’m not sure we can find it for a group of Neandertals. Plus, do you do some sort condor thing, raising them so they never knew who actually raised them, and then acclimatizing them somehow? If that were possible, it would assuage some of my concerns. I just don’t think it’s realistic, though. Jurassic Park and all that…

We have no moral obligation to undo what our ancestors did 40,000 years ago. Where would that sort of reasoning end up? We gonna give the earth back to all the species we’ve bumped off? We can’t even control our own populations enough to slow down chewing through the earth right now.

Seems to me there may possibly be an ethical difference between an animal species driven extinct, and a sentient semihuman one.

Anyway, in terms of land, the earth actually has massive amounts of near uninhabited lands. Its just lands that no-one is particualrily interested in. Look at Canada and Siberia, enormous amounts of wilderness. Coincidentally, wilderness of the type and climate Neanderthals were adapted for. I don’t think it should be too difficult to set up a nature preserve, or use an existing one.

[iiandyiiii]

I came across this article recently:

Neanderthal children were slow to grow up — just like modern kids

And it made me think of this thread, which is one of my favorites. The article summarizes data that suggests that Neanderthal children grew up relatively slowly, just like we do, in contrast to relatively fast-growing chimp and other great ape youngsters.

To recap the thread, assuming that we’re able to clone Neanderthal’s in the next few years, I’ve suggested something like the following long-term experiment (purely as an intellectual exercise – I wouldn’t actually advocate for this in real life without some very long discussion, exploration, and research):

We impregnate ten volunteer mothers, screened to be in stable and loving relationships that are able to provide stable and loving parental care, with ten Neanderthal babies. Perhaps they already have older children, or not. We set them up in an apartment building or neighboring houses, in secret, to prevent tabloid attention and weirdoes. Their peer group is largely each other, at least at first. They can be home schooled all together, if we have reason to believe they are a danger to other children, based on their behavior in their early years, or they can go to regular schools with other children if they don’t present any danger. The children will probably look a bit different, and they might stick together, but they’d see modern society as the “normal” environment and home, just as a dog or cat raised in an apartment sees that apartment as its normal environment and home. It’s possible they won’t have the same language abilities that we do, but if so, that’s true of some modern humans as well. If they can’t vocalize, they can be taught sign language (which some great apes are able to partially utilize). They’ll be different, sure- but raised with TV and internet, they will watch TV and surf the internet. They will have favorite movies and music, they will love cheeseburgers and fries, and perhaps they will love football and ice hockey. The men may all grow up to be linebackers or MMA fighters- they may be that strong. They may grow up to become researchers themselves.

Legally, the researchers would have no rights but what the parents grant them; let’s assume the researchers provide for the families’ living expenses in exchange for periodic non-painful observation, though the parents are free to leave with their children at any time. Legally, by the way, I don’t see how it could possibly be done any other way- researchers don’t have the right to imprison children or adults. If the parent is unable to manage the child, then the state takes over, just as with any other uncontrollable child.

I don’t see any reason to believe they would be so different that, even raised among us, they wouldn’t be able to relate to us. We know that Neanderthals are already a part of us, genetically. Raised among us, we will be what is normal to them. Our lifestyle will be normal to them. Our food and culture will be normal to them. The fossil record shows that they lived and cooperated with each other to survive; now they will live and cooperate with us.

Hypothetically, anyway.

[iiandyiiii]

Ethical considerations that strike me as legitimate (I doubt I’ve thought of everything, even having read the thread over again):

Immunities to disease – would a neanderthal baby acquire immunities from their surrogate mother, as I believe modern human babies do, or could that process fail? Would they be especially vulnerable for some genetic reason to modern diseases?

Financial incentives – if neanderthals turn out to be incredible strength athletes, would some parents be incentivized to have neanderthal babies who become incredible NFL players or boxers to make them rich? If so, is that ethical, and should it be legal, and if not, how could it be stopped?

Is it ethical to knowingly create humans who might have a higher-than-otherwise chance of being less capable to relate to modern society, due to things like inability to vocalize speech? Of course, this could also go the other way – they might also be smarter than modern humans… their brains were bigger, on average, after all.

[carnivorousplant]

@iiandyiiii

Financial incentives – if neanderthals turn out to be incredible strength athletes, would some parents be incentivized to have neanderthal babies who become incredible NFL players or boxers

And scratch themselves a lot.

@iiandyiiii

Is it ethical to knowingly create humans who might have a higher-than-otherwise chance of being less capable to relate to modern society, due to things like inability to vocalize speech?

I thought they theory that Neanderthals couldn’t vocalize had been discarded.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@John_Mace

You can say that again.

Plus, I get the idea that some folks here get their info about Neanderthals from the 1920s.

Yes, they need to improve their estimation of our extinct hominid cousins. Some 1920s-style Derth praise.

[Johanna]

@Mr.Kobayashi

Incidentally, there must have been a point in time where there was only one Neanderthal alive before going extinct. Imagine that.

Someone did imagine that to the point of making a movie about it. Although the filmmaker gave him a Cro-Magnon girlfriend so he wouldn’t feel so lonely.