Neanderthal cloning

[gfish]

Just saw a neat link talking about Neanderthal cloning. And I know this is my neophile, technocratic side talking, but my only response to the idea is an immediate "do it do it do it!"

Caveats: Assuming we have figured out the cloning of large mammals and have worked our way up through chimps with a high confidence of success. Obviously making deformed babies that die within hours of birth is bad. But that's just a technical problem which will be fixed eventually. At that point... why not? I really don't find the other arguments persuasive. The kids won't fit in? That was the argument a justice of the peace in Louisiana used last month to deny a marriage permit to an interracial couple! The fact that we won't learn about native Neanderthal culture is both stunningly obvious and irrelevant. There is still so much we could learn about their capabilities. Really, the suggestion that we clone a bunch and put them in a little paleolithic enclave is the most revolting "solution" in the article. What an ugly idea, forcing sentients to live a squalid life under the excuse of keeping them "natural".

Comments

[niac.livejournal.com]

I think the greatest argument against doing so is a lampshade of what you just wrote:
There is still so much we could learn about their capabilities.

As it regards living beings, who are we to create them for the purpose of learning their capabilities? I don't know that cloning sentient creatures to know their limitations strikes me as the moral choice.

It's certainly very interesting idea. And as you well know, I'm a big fan of "because I can." But this strikes me as inappropriate.

Perhaps good debate over this at the Night Kitchen should follow some time.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

So, if they do get to the point where they could successfully clone a Neanderthal ... are you going to volunteer to be the "host-mother"?

Speaking as someone who gave birth to two 8.5 lb. babies with heads that were quite large enough, thankyouverymuch, I canNOT imagine choosing to bear a child with an even larger skull. OWWWWWW.

[maribou]

I think it would be so incredibly important to know that the children were going to be raised in a safe and loving family where they could, if need be, be home-schooled, free-schooled or whatever. That if we brought sentients into a world where they were the only people like them, they would be assured of being loved, well-parented, and well-educated.

And I don't trust any corp/gov currently in charge of such things to do that.

In the theoretical case where that would be guaranteed, I have no problem with it.

(Yes, people get born into suboptimal conditions all the time - but there's something about being *that different* that seems to require, to me, that they get a more than fair shake at everything we *can* make good. I think of some of the home-raised chimps who knew enough to know they weren't all the way equal with their family and were heartbroken - and I shudder to imagine a more sentient being - someone essentially all the way human - raised into a less-than-equal position, or suffering other kinds of psychological trauma.)

[entelein.livejournal.com]

Heh, Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels deal with the thought experiment of co-existing with Neanderthals.

[onefishjyuufish.livejournal.com]

In that vein, I would love to have my own cloned dodo pet.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

Creating people for science? That isn't too much better than killing them for science. It's stunningly unethical.

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

Ah, but realize Fish (at least at one time) has always wanted to create sentients for science! (AIs, which, if truly sentient, would be a similar moral issue, perhaps.)

The idea of recreating an extinct species? Think that's pretty cool. Admit, a person is a touchy issue. I think the current IP-law around genetics of all kind is all kinds of wrong, and until we can fix that, creating new people through that science is probably a bad idea.

-B.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Well, one, we don't know if they're people or not. The very act of performing this experiment would almost certainly change the very definition of "people", probably making it far more expansive and helping us include at least the other chimps.

And two... if raised in a loving environment, who cares why the kid was made? People make babies for all kinds of crazy reasons.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

"The kids won't fit in? That was the argument a justice of the peace in Louisiana used last month to deny a marriage permit to an interracial couple! "

That judge was wrong in that case, because the people involved were all of the same species. Neanderthals are a different species. We really don't know how they think, or how well they will adapt to living amongst us. They did go extinct, and we don't know why. What if the reasons stem from a mentality that can't handle our languages?

What might happen, if we did this, is that these new, non-human people might be enough like us to be able to sort of live amongst us, but not enough like us actually fit in. They might be just different enough to trigger an uncanny valley effect. Imagine having to live that life!

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Oh, they'd probably be stunningly ugly by modern human standards. They're literally troglodytes, after all. But I'm really not sure that's a reason not to make them. The people who raised them would certainly love them. We'd probably want to make enough to provide breeding opportunities for them. I think that's the only substantial moral quandary to be faced -- creating just one would be implicitly denying them the basic human right of finding a mate. Not being thought ugly by the majority culture just doesn't rank on the same level to me.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

This (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy) is what I immediately thought of.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Hee, yes! I couldn't remember the name of it. Great story.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

Weirdly, I was just talking to someone about it yesterday.

[adularia.livejournal.com]

I don't think the argument "The kids won't fit in!" is a valid one. The more interesting question is how those kids are treated by / socialized within human society.

The inability to learn about Neanderthal culture is one thing -- obviously it would be decades to centuries before a new 'Neanderthal culture' existed to study, in the best case, with all the ethical problems that carries.

The real problem is the decision to create a sentient specifically to put it under glass, real or figurative, with the expectation that we get to subject it to a lifetime of experimentation. I would LOVE to see the results of those experiments, and I'm kinda mentally designing a dozen or six, but I can't in good conscience support the idea. The idea that those experiments would only be done "with consent" is meaningless unless you're willing to forgo doing any experimentation before they were old enough to consent (edited to add: and that's expressing consent in human terms of age readiness; we have no idea what developmental stage nonhuman sentients ought to attain before our idea of consent applies, which in itself strikes me as a great reason to go ahead with it. Chicken-and-egg problem!) Purely observational behavior experiments of the type done on human infants seem okay, but that's at absolute most.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

See, the hypothetical I keep thinking about is a human fetus with a fatal genetic disorder that is saved by some crazy experimental gene therapy. Would doing a longterm study to see how this affects them as they grow up be a horrible violation of ethics? Giving them some psychological tests and MRIs before they're of the age to consent doesn't seem particularly questionable to me -- that's what their legal guardian is for, to make those calls.

[avhn.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the perceived moral difference is between cloning an neanderthal and cloning primates in general (chimp or human). It seems that, culturally, there is a difference, but I'm not sure how that's justified or at all logical

[gfish.livejournal.com]

That's one of the things I find most interesting about this. If we had a clutch of Neanderthals walking around, surely that would accelerate the process of extending some form of personhood to all the great apes? The more plainly the soft continuum of sentience is, the harder it is to say humans occupy some magical special place in the world.

[avhn.livejournal.com]

I think part of it must be that we consider speech to be such a specialized tool that "sets us apart," but I have a lot of trouble with that considering that chimps can learn basic signs and many species have learned communication. The idea of establishing that continuum more clearly seems valuable, but it also seems like people are thinking of Neanderthals as totally different and not on the continuum at all, which strikes me as odd.

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

I know _Friday_ was about Artificial People who were in some ways more capable than average, and we'd probably think of jar-grown Neanderthals as less capable than average. But the story popped to mind- how would *I* feel about being brought up in the world as a science experiment?

Design such an experiment where you were the subject, and you wouldn't hate your 'parents', and you've got an acceptable scenario. Anything less is just medical torture.