If we cloned Neanderthals, what rights would they have?

http://www.reason.com/news/show/131717.html

by robg • 17 years ago

33 25 17 years ago

ahoyhere• 17 years ago

This topic is explored in the Thursday Next series of novels by Jasper Fforde. Really. He's not taken seriously enough for most people to include him in the scifi cannon, but he deserves to be.

BerislavLopac2• 17 years ago

My favorite take on this topic is the novel "Les Animaux dénaturés" by French author Jean Bruller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bruller).

dave_au• 17 years ago

The 42 minutes to anywhere idea is covered briefly as well. It's like it's Fforde day. And I'll never complain about Fforde day.

markessien• 17 years ago

The right to party? No, I'm serious, why should they be any different from us? I say we clone them and see if they can survive in modern society.

BerislavLopac2• 17 years ago

Now that would be outright cruel.

cabalamat2• 17 years ago

> No, I'm serious, why should they be any different from us?

Um, because they're a different species. Look, I'm all for bringing back extinct species if it's possible -- mammoths, Neanderthals, dodos, whatever -- but it's silly to expect one species to behave identically to another one, even if they are closely related.

josefresco• 17 years ago

I'm really tempted to make a joke about car insurance and/or Geico, but this is Hacker News and it's serious business around here.

jjs• 17 years ago

Almost making a joke is worse than just making the joke.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

The way to do it around here is to deadpan it, and see how many delayed guffaws you get.

pavel_lishin2• 17 years ago

Hey, metajokes ought to have all the same rights as jokes, even if they were born of a chimp!

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

Welcome to HN's funny section, the lower section.

access_denied2• 17 years ago

They would get Neanderthals rights. They get a copy of Human rights if they wish and then we will make a deal, each race gets what it needs.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

Human rights have already been extended to all the Great Apes in Spain. Why would we make Neanderthal rights and not simply follow precedent (you know, the thing all western countries do because we're all lazy SOB's: example, DMCA's cloning by most western countries as a legal base for their own laws) and extend legal rights to all of the Homo genus.

access_denied2• 17 years ago

Because that would restrict the rights to self-definitition of the Neanderthals.

pavel_lishin2• 17 years ago

Wait, so it would be unethical for a human to bring a Neanderthal child to term, but if we cram it into a monkey, suddenly it's hunky dorey?

Silentio• 17 years ago

I love your comment and I think it sheds light on the possible way a Neanderthal really would be treated if we did clone one.

mdd• 17 years ago

Obviously, we'd have to consult an Unfrozen Caveman Constitutional Lawyer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfrozen_Caveman_Lawyer

ilkhd2• 17 years ago

Cloning does not work (yet) - period. If you remember Dolly the sheep had strange complications with aging process, cellular abnormalities ()short telomers). And look, the older mother becomes the higher probability of Down syndrome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trisomy21_graph.jpg. (by the way this diminish doubts that Sarah Palin is a real mother of that poor kid, not her yonger daughter), bacuse with age number of mutations and defects in dna grows up So, it is never clear what is the quality of DNA is going to be used for the clone. We need to take responsibility on that.

tjmc• 17 years ago

Interesting question. It's a pity that the author only considers ways that cloned Neanderthals might be mentally inferior to us though. Given their larger brain size, it's conceivable that they could have had greater mental capacities but were out competed for other reasons. One of the linked articles mentions that Neanderthals took longer to develop (possibly due to their larger brain size) and this might have put them at a disadvantage. Perhaps homo sapiens were simply more aggressive?

kingkongrevenge• 17 years ago

An interesting hypothesis about Neanderthal brain size is that most of their behavior, including tool making, was hard wired in neurons rather than learned through intelligence and culture. Neanderthal tools and dwellings are identical across tens of thousands of years. Human tools vary a lot from culture to culture and across time even if function is unchanged, because of imperfect propagation across generations.

The idea is that the extra gray matter in a cloned Neanderthal's head would have him instinctively finding good stones to shape into tools in a specific way, even if nobody ever showed him how to do that.

Scriptor• 17 years ago

Though I don't have a source to back this up, I really think that population densities were too low during those times for much Cro-Magnon-Neanderthal (funny how one's capitalized and the other isn't) interaction. That said, aggression would not have been enough for humans, especially since the Cro-Magnons were probably weaker physically.

There is always the possibility that there were changes in the environment that they couldn't cope with but our ancestors did. Longer childhoods could have been a hindrance.

As you know, a larger brain does not necessarily mean a higher intelligence. It could have evolved to simply create a higher volume-surface area ratio that helped preserve heat in their heads.

cabalamat2• 17 years ago

Neanderthals, if resurrected, may indeed be cleverer than us. But the fact that we're here and they're not suggests to me that we are probably cleverer.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

Would they have rights? Currently I know for sure of one country in which they would have all the legal rights of humans: Spain. The Spanish parliament extended human rights onto all the Great Apes, which would likely blanket cover any cloned Neanderthals.

The question would be other countries, which the cloning of a Neanderthal would likely help extend legal human rights to at least every species in the Homo genus.

Personally I usually avoid the whole human rights for Great Apes (even though I completely agree with it) because I can see both sides of the argument (I believe saving a humans life is more important than any animals life). However, I'd be joining any protest (here in Canada) to extend human rights throughout the whole Homo genus.

Although once we establish human rights for all of the Homo genus, would that legally prevent the cloning of Neanderthals without their prior legal consent?

Allocator2008• 17 years ago

Why clone Neanderthals? It would be like winning the war in 'Starship Troopers', then cloning the bugs because it was so much fun fighting them the first time, we just had to have another go at it. That is just stupid. Our ancestors beat these guys 25,000 years ago. I say let the victory stand. There will plenty of other struggles to be had no doubt, maybe even the insects of 'Starship Troopers'! :-)

If we cloned Neanderthals, what rights would they have?

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