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So easy, we could do it to a cave man
Jurassic Park was cool because they made plausible the idea that dinosaur DNA could be extracted from fossilized bones and ambered mosquitoes and then grown into very dangerous, very non-fossilized velociraptors. Fast-forward 65 million years, or actually about a decade and a half (from when the film came out), and you’ve got news like this about scientists reconstructing woolly mammoth DNA and then birthing one in the uterus of an elephant. And then, they want to do that with a Neanderthal DNA. That’s right. They want to make real cave men.
The full genome of the Neanderthal, an ancient human species probably driven to extinction by the first modern humans that entered Europe some 45,000 years ago, is expected to be recovered shortly. If the mammoth can be resurrected, the same would be technically possible for Neanderthals.
In fact, Wade points out, there are good reasons to re-create a Neanderthal: “No one knows if Neanderthals could speak. A living one would answer that question and many others.”
Slow down, now. This is just nuts, and I don’t think I have the wisdom to know if it’d be wrong. Would it be wrong?
back to top26 Comments to “So easy, we could do it to a cave man”
I could see the value of a resolution to the vexing issue of whether Neanderthals could purchase car insurance over the internet.
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Comment #1 was a really stupid comment, btw, made by a man so eager to go for the obvious joke that he failed to pay proper heed to the headline.
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Several years ago I read a science fiction book that was based on this or a similar idea. I don’t remember the details, but it was told from the point of view of the human “specimen,” who naturally resented having been given life purely for the sake of scientific experimentation, and who had no one else like her in the entire world.
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Didnt neanderthals have larger skulls (and presumably bigger brains within them?) Didnt they hunt in large groups and does that not presuppose some type of spoken language.
Given all the above, one must presume that a neanderthal infant would have a larger sized head even at birth.
Better plan for a C-section delivery right now.
And once born, would the child’s medical privacy be respected, lest he/she wind up little better than a midway freak show?
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Cool. One day you could get your own cave man for a Christmas present from your kids. You could raise them up just to get your wife’s honey do list done for you, weed the garden, clean the basement or garage or possibly other things less useful. Hope the host mother isn’t a lefty who might want to abort it at the last minute – just for convenience or the fun of it
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I don’t know about organizing the garage, Llama, but surely your average Neanderthal would be pretty good in the hunting-gathering skills group.
Seriously, this subject brings up your same basic imago Dei issues as does cloning. Is the destruction of an embryo required in order to get things started? If successful, will this new creature (presumably, a person) be given all the rights of personhood, or will those who did the work try to claim ownership? Probably many other questions could also be asked.
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I have long suspected that the Neanderthals were the Nephilim we read about in Genesis. Anyone else got any conjecture here??
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Pauline,
I don’t know if this is the story you were referring to, but “The Ugly Little Boy” by Isaac Asimov has this same premise.
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The spiritual issues ( Imago Dei, above) and the secular questions (could he vote?) are unanswerable to the point that any step along this road is unarguably immoral.
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#7 – Uh, how about NO.
#9 Ok – I agree this is creepy and shouldn’t/won’t happen, but I don’t follow your reasoning. Are you saying that it’s immoral – in principle – to try and find an answer to these questions?
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#10 — No, I’m saying that it would be immoral to create such a being, the existence of which mandates answers to such unanswerable questions.
Absent the creature, the questions are harmless fodder for undergraduate bull sessions.
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Is it just me, or was this a little facetious?
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If this could be done, I’m afraid my curiosity would eat me up so that I’d have to find out exactly what a Neanderthal was like…
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No need to do that. We know a young guy who looks just like a living cave man, like the guy in the commercial.
He was going to be best man in his friend’s wedding. The maid of honor burst into tears when she saw him. So he cut his hair – but it is growing again!
No joke. Cave man lives.
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The features of the artist reconstructed Neanderthal man are exaggerated to make him look more primitive. He could very well have looked like a modern European, but such ideas are considered heresy among the psuedoscientific community.
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No, I’m saying that it would be immoral to create such a being, the existence of which mandates answers to such unanswerable questions.
But if we create such a being, then the questions are no longer unanswerable.
We may for example find out that the Imago Dei question doesn’t have a bright-line answer, but that the boundaries are fuzzy in reality, and we just draw nice sharp lines because it’s more comfortable for us to do so.
IMHO, the only moral question that comes into play is, would we treat such a creature, human or not, with dignity and respect, or simply as an owned object to be experimented with as we wish.
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Wouldn’t it shock all the evolutionists and nearly all of the mainstream scientists and others who’ve studied “primitive beings” if they try this “experiment” and find out that Neanderthal Man is much smarter than they are?
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That would be fun…
It would be almost as much fun as seeing a true “missing link” come to life.
I find myself in total agreement with Thomas.
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#17 Well, their brains are bigger.
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#11 Ok – I get that.
But I think the spiritual questions – as you have posed them – are fundamentally flawed. The secular ones can be answered w/simple ethical value judgments, though I think it would be a long time before we’d achieve consensus!
We are not specially created in the image of God and, hence, distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom in other than our species-unique properties, which do not include being very God-like! Even our species distinctions are mostly a matter of degree, not a matter of kind. The idea that God created us in His image is no more true than the idea that he did it in a single day just a few thousand years ago!
Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired. – Notebook, 1903; Mark Twain, a Biography
Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion– several of them. – “The Lowest Animal,” 1897
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We are not specially created in the image of God
To make such a claim, you must be God himself. Let us all bow down and worship you.
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stubob post 11,
now we are creating life effectrviely to order in test tubes today. Why would creating a Neanderthal from DNA be any different?
We have already with SCNT techniques entered a world in which the DNA is the key measure of the identity, since once the DNA is established, the resulting entity can in principal be brought to life.
So lets do it in pieces: what is the problem with creating a mammoth? We hold elephants and other animals in zoos and animals are regularly used in scientific experiements. Creating a mammoth for science does not seem outside the realm of our present understanding of experimental (or agricultural) ethics.
Now if a mammoth is acceptable, why not a Neanderthal?
And of course, if a mammoth is acceptable, pursuing this path is also acceptable so long as we do not classify Neanderthals as human.
What Pauline’s post 3 includes as an implicit assumption is that Neanderthals were indeed human. If Neanderthals were human, however, this still begs the question of why such an effort is any different than say in vitro fertilizatikon?
If the Neanderthal is crerated for itself and the Neanderthals needs are consider of significance (much as with any child who is born), then what is the fundamental issue?
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Xion (#19), I was aware of the fact that Neanderthal Man has a larger brain than most people nowadays, but intelligence does not correlate with brain size. However, people in the “old days” were quite smart, as can be seen in the Bible.
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Seems like it comes down to whether neanderthals are “men” or “animals”, assuming you recognize a difference. If they’re animals, then cloning them is no different than cloning sheep or cats, about which nobody has really complained.
If they’re animals and you object to treating them a certain way because they’re particularly “smart” animals, then what does that imply about other species like dolphins and chimps?
If they’re “men” and yet are genetically distinct from homo sapiens, then that also creates some theological quandries.
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To elaborate on that last point, if man is uniquely created in the image of God, and if we consider neanderthals to be “men”, then one need not be “genetically homo sapiens” in order to be “a man” (or woman). In that case, what’s the criteria for humanity if not genetic?
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buddyglass post 24/25,
excellent and important observations. And amusingly, the easiest way to resolve this question would be to clone a neanderthal. My sense is that the techology is still a bit primitive and refinement is needed before it can be pursued ethically, but its time will come.
And when it does, conservative Christianity will, as you describe, be faced with some very interestng questions regarding man and the image of God.
This is just one of the technological changes which make traditional conservative Christianity increasingly difficult to sustain.
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