Originally posted by Sherlock Holmes
Originally posted by SaturnFX
Its an animal...just an animal. cloning animals out of extinction = good.
Why is cloning an extinct animal ''good'' ?
Don't be obtuse.
A species is a group of animals that can produce fertile offspring amongst themselves upon mating.
Are you saying that it would be ok to exploit and experiment on a living being purely because it wouldn't produce a fertile baby if we had sex with
it ?
Is that how you would seriously, ethically justify your suggestion of dumping some hapless neanderthals on an island ?
How would the neanderthals cope after being ''created'' without any parents or tribe to guide them through their formative years ?
It would be a truly horrific experience for these unfortunate neanderthals.
Have you not got a conscience ?
He can justify it easily; just class Neanderthals as Zygotes:
Originally posted by SaturnFX
the experiment is giving them life..a biological experiment involving dna strands and a zygote..are we not allowed to experiment on zygotes now?
equal rights for zygote movement...never heard of it.
By the way, a Neanderthal/modern human mating would be even likelier to produce fertile offspring new than it was when our ancestors originally mated.
We share
99.5% - nearly 99.9% of our DNA with them. As some of this shared DNA has come from
mating with them long ago, obviously we could produce fertile offspring together back when we had even less in common than we do now.
It would seem the assumption that the DNA of any two humans is 99.9% similar in content and
identity no longer holds.
The researchers were astonished to locate 1,447 CNVs in nearly 2,900 genes, the starting "templates" written in the DNA that are used by cells to
make the proteins which drive our bodies.
This is a huge, hitherto unrecognised, level of variation between one individual and the next.
"Each one of us has a unique pattern of gains and losses of complete sections of DNA," said Matthew Hurles, of the UK's Wellcome Trust Sanger
Institute.
So if you met a random Neanderthal, it's possible his genes would be closer to yours than those of your next-door neighbour.
Scientists are no longer agreed that we should regard Neanderthals as a separate species.
With the similarities so great between us and this branch of our ancestors, there is only one way to decide on the morality of experimenting on
Neanderthals. "Would it be ethical to do this to our own children?"
People are forgetting, any cloned Neanderthal will be someone's child, because the only way to create it would be to place the cloned zygote into a
human mother for gestation. Then, for optimum development, the baby would need a human mother figure to cuddle and feed it, and to teach it the basics
needed for human development.
What sort of outcry would there be when these mothers were expected to give up the children they loved to be "observed" in a colony on a desert
island?
What sort of realism would there be in a colony which began with children who had all suffered this trauma?
The experiment would tell us more about the effects of such trauma on humans than it would about Neanderthals.
