Right, so we should be prepared for any outcome. And not just for intelligence–their temperament and motivations are at least as open to speculation.
There are current projects like Pleistocene Park and the Rewilding Europe areas, undertaken for their own reasons, without human habitation. There is plenty of room to critique their ‘accuracy.’
But while one such location might be adapted to serve the needs of a New Neanderthal project, I’m talking about something rather different in motivation. Not a museum-piece recreation, nor a quasi-mystical notion of how Neanderthals ‘should’ live, I mean simply an environment and lifestyle within the range of what we know Neanderthals can handle. And which, given the alternative of living as a microscopic minority in the modern world (or as pathetic, boxed-in dependents), they might just prefer.
I’m still addressing the OP question of what the ethical approach to such a project would be. I think we would owe it to them to give them the option of a world and life no worse than (if not precisely the same as) that of their forefathers.
We don’t know enough about how different the innate behavior of Neanderthals is from moderns. We don’t really even know much about “innate” behavior of moderns, and it’s hard to define, but the differences would be easier to study. that’s a reason to do this, as well as a reason not to. I question the ethics of cloning a 40Kyo modern, but I think we have a better idea that the differences in behavior would be minimal in this case.
Thanks! I didn’t know. Odd that mtDNA can be incompatible between individuals of the same species, but compatible across genera.
In one case, it’s a genetic duplicate. In the other, it’s not. I consider that an enormous difference. If it happens randomly for a few individuals, then there are no significant consequences. The problem is when you deviate from that.
Recreating the environment is far less significant than recreating the culture. Of course, the two are intertwined, but I grant that we can duplicate the environment well enough, if we knew enough about the culture. We don’t. We don’t even know enough about any existing human cultures to “duplicate” one. We just use them and let children grow up in them. Ones that are lost tend to be lost for good (but admittedly, usually for more reasons than simply that we just can’t.)
I agree, but I think we can do a lot better than that- I think the fossil evidence tells us that life for most Neanderthal’s was nasty, brutish, and short. Whatever environment any hypothetical Neanderthal infant is raised will seem like home to him/her- whether it’s a high-rise in Shanghai, a favela in urban Brazil, or a small town in rural Norway (which might look a lot more like their ancestors’ environment).
How many are you going to clone? Isn’t it unethical to clone one without cloning a potential mate? Wouldn’t you be sentencing the clone to a lonely existence? And even cloning a single mate might not solve the problem. What if Clone A rejects Clone B as a mate (the “Bride of Frankenstein” problem)?
What if you wind up with a super-strong, but sexually frustrated male Neanderthal? Are you going to set him loose in our society?
I am astonished by the posters who say they don’t see any ethical issues with cloning a Neanderthal.
It’s unlikely that there would be a significant difference in 'innate" behavior. Much of human behavior depends on socialization anyway.
What problem? We know that identical twins, triplets and quadruplets exist. What
“consequences” would there be if there were 10x as many twins? The existence of more clones doesn’t reduce the genetic variability of our species as a whole.
I agree; duplicating authentic Old Neanderthal culture is a non-starter. The New Neanderthals would have to make their own, out of what we provide for them plus their innate nature… whatever that turns out to be.
Exactly. That’s why the challenge, the goal, should initially be to keep the NNs’ options as wide-open as possible. Let’s see what they can do, and want to do, unfettered from the circumstances of their Old incarnation.
We certainly wouldn’t let them die from treatable maladies in childhood, for starters.
I definitely think it would be very wrong to raise them substantially apart from each other, as separate adoptees into modern households and communities. At least initially, their modern parents must go into the place we make for the NN, not the other way round.
In my vision, that “Pleistocene-like” skill set would just be the floor for their cultural knowledge. They’d be welcome to as much beyond that as they could, or wished to, embrace.
If, by reason of capacity or inclination, NNs prove unsuited to adult lives integrated into the wider modern world, they must have an alternative, with the dignity and self-determination that all peoples deserve.
I agree- but they could all live in the same apartment building/neighborhood/etc, raised as an extended family (with different parents), or something like that. I don’t see the need for a separate facility- at least not immediately. As strong as they might be, an infant is not going to be dangerous to anyone.
I didn’t think about anything like that at all… what if it turns out the physical differences are large enough that Neanderthals could dominate every strength-based sport (imagine a trained Neanderthal MMA fighter!)? That might introduce some unfortunate financial incentives for cloning.
A group of ten neanderthals wouldn’t be a breeding population. If neanderthals lived in groups of ten, they almost certainly cross-bred with other groups of ten nearby in order to maintain their diversity. We’d have to clone hundreds.
Perhaps we could get round this by periodically implanting a new, unrelated clone in the womb of one of the mothers; but this might raise ethical problems by itself. What would be the social result of unexplained virgin births in a tiny close-knit population?
Even with a thousand or more, there’s no guarantee they would choose to breed with each other, assuming we’re treating them as people with the same rights as us. I don’t think this would be the goal of the research, anyway- I think the goal would be to better understand the anatomy, behavior, and cognition of our close cousins, the Neanderthals.
If this technique becomes available, I doubt we could restrict the population to a few tens or hundreds. We’d have to accept that we would have a population of neaderthals for keeps; the same with any cloned mammoth or woolly rhinos, moa or giant sloth that are created. No species need become extinct ever again.
On the other hand, the process of reproducing extinct animals is really tricky, even with good material to work with. See this attempt with the Pyrenean ibex;
sperm donors have legal rights? a woman renting her womb for another couple has legal rights? I see a scenario where a Neandertal is the domain of a scientist who contractually holds all the parental rights. It would essentially make such a creature a lab rat.
The reality is, if there ever came a time when this was possible to do, the parents of the Neandertal baby are bound to be scientists, not random passersby. That doesn’t make the baby a lab rat, any more than any other child.
Parents have children every day for selfish reasons. If those parents are horrible enough, we terminate parental rights for those parents and society places the child in a new home. We give parents broad latitude in how they choose to care for their children, but children are not slaves or property.
Of course, this isn’t going to happen as a one-off mad scientist type experiment. It would require a team of specialists. If the project leader is a psychopath who wants to create the baby to be a slave, the other members of the project aren’t going to cooperate.
All this presupposes what is born is human. we’ve had a couple years of evolution since Neandertals disappeared. We don’t know if they have the same mental capacity of today’s human. Imagine a world full of politicians or reality show producers.
As for the notion that we’d be obligated to provide the children with a paleolithic lifestyle, that’s simply nonsense. Modern Homo sapiens sapiens children evolved for a paleolithic lifestyle, but we don’t feel like we need to teach them the life of a paleolithic hunter.
The obvious parallel are the various gorillas and orangutans and chimpanzees that have been raised by human beings and fit in, however imperfectly, to our modern world. Koko the gorilla has different needs than a human, but she doesn’t need a simulated African rainforest to be happy, she needs space, she needs quiet, she needs food, she needs a social life, she needs intellectual challenges appropriate for her, and so on.
Of course we can expect that a neandertal child is going to have different social and environmental needs than a Hss child. But if we can provide for the social and intellectual needs of a gorilla or orangutan child, we can provide for a neadertal child. That doesn’t mean teaching them flint knapping and tracking, it means making sure they have enough peace and quiet, they might need more than a Hss child. It means they might need more space to run and climb and roughhouse than a Hss child. They might need more gentleness, or more toughness. Or, more likely, every neandertal child will have individual needs just like every modern human is different, and every gorilla is different.