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

[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.