Tag: Neanderthal

neanderthals cloning, continued

Tyler Cowen considers reasons why we wouldn’t want to clone neanderthals. There are many ethical questions on how we would deal with the offspring:

Then ask yourself some basic questions about Neanderthals: could they be taught in our schools?  Who would rear the first generation?  Would human parents find this at all rewarding?  Do they have enough impulse control to move freely in human society?  How happy would they be with such a limited number of peers?  What public health issues would be involved and how would we learn about those issues in advance?  What would happen the first time a Neanderthal kills a human child?  Carries and transmits a contagious disease?  By the way, how much resistance would the Neanderthals have to modern diseases?

What kinds of “human rights” would we issue to them?  Would we end up treating them better than lab chimpanzees?  Would they be covered by ACA and have emergency room rights?

We don’t know the answers here, but I would expect to run up against a number of significant fails on these issues and others.

neanderthal cloning

Neanderthal

A Neanderthal man

A Harvard professor believes it is possible to bring back the Neanderthal species from extinction. To do so you would need “an adventurous surrogate” as he puts it. The Neanderthals have been extinct for more than 30,000 years, but traces of their DNA remain. George Church, a geneticist, says in theory you should be able to clone the DNA and create an embryo, which can be implanted in a surrogate and brought to term. The ethics of such an experiment are murky, to put it mildly.

More about it here [Der Spiegel] and here [New York Daily News].

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