Yes, We Should Clone Neanderthals
Kyle Munkittrick argues:
30,000 years ago a Neanderthal woman died in what would become Croatia’s Vindija cave. Five years ago, 454 Life Sciences and the Max Planck Institute started working together on the tedious and time-consuming task of piecing her fossilized DNA back together. Just over a month ago, they succeeded and, in the process, revealed that most of us are between 1% and 4% Neanderthal.
To crudely paraphrase the ever artful Carl Zimmer, knowing where Neanderthals fit into the evolution of Homo sapiens is essential to understanding the development of the human mind.
Knowing where Neanderthals fit, however, also creates a problem. What do we do if what makes humans “human” isn’t from a “human” at all? How do we justify “human rights” in light of evidence that our rational and moral minds are in no small part the result of prehistoric crossbreeding?
In short: if human rights are based on being human, what rights would a cloned Neanderthal have?
The problem is, of course, that we don’t have a cloned Neanderthal. Which is why we need to make one.
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John Hawks answers:
I’m completely in favor of cloning Neandertal tissue cultures. I really think we can learn a lot about our biology by understanding that part of our evolutionary history at a cellular level, and that knowledge may well help people.
But making a whole person is different. Not only in an ethical sense but also a practical one, as our ability to understand the brain and immune system in living people isn’t mature enough to make meaningful predictions about the small genetic differences between Neandertals and living people.
Of course today this is all just idle talk. […] This shouldn’t be a conversation about cloning, it should be about the logical consequence: adoption.
Who will step up to adopt a Neandertal child, and why aren’t they helping living children instead?
Should we clone a Neanderthal? After all, as Kyle goes on to point out, we would learn quite a bit.
If the argument is against cloning a Neanderthal, then what about other species? Where do we draw the moral line?