Wanted: Surrogate for Neanderthal Baby

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
75,399
I don’t think you will find a Want Ad phrased as such in your local paper, but the call will be going out in principle. Scientists are getting close to cloning a Neanderthal from ‘spare parts’ lying about the lab and all they will need soon is an ‘adventurous’ woman to serve as the surrogate to the infant. Adventurous to say the least. :eek:

"We have lots of Neanderthal parts around the lab. We are creating Neanderthal cells. Let's say someone has a healthy, normal Neanderthal baby. Well, then, everyone will want to have a Neanderthal kid. Were they superstrong or supersmart? Who knows? But there's one way to find out."
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Considering science always shows them as being dumb or at least hulks .. they probably won't get many women signing up.
 
This sounds like the plot from species (the movie) "lets just put the parts together and see what kind of baby comes out"
Hopefully none of those "parts" came via a strange signal from space.
 
Godmachine said:
Considering science always shows them as being dumb or at least hulks .. they probably won't get many women signing up.
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Are you kidding? This woman will be famous for the rest of her life, as the mother of the first Neanderthal, even if the baby does end up with an IQ of 60
 
sir-gold said:
Are you kidding? This woman will be famous for the rest of her life, as the mother of the first Neanderthal, even if the baby does end up with an IQ of 60
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It would be nice if the woman in question could actually become famous for this. But, this could end up with her dead.

sir-gold said:
This sounds like the plot from species (the movie) "lets just put the parts together and see what kind of baby comes out"
Hopefully none of those "parts" came via a strange signal from space.
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It will be a cross between that and a Geico commercial.

Godmachine said:
Considering science always shows them as being dumb or at least hulks .. they probably won't get many women signing up.
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I'm not sure what you mean....that is exactly the kind of guy most women go for....
 
I'll routinely tell people in discussions that the social issues of the last 100 years will pale in comparison to the one's those in our twenties will have to deal with. Not that it'll be a new dialogue, just troublesome due to it becoming reality rather than SF. I wonder how many people won't be able to handle the future-shock.
 
I think there is a reason Neanderthal's are no longer with us...leave it be.
Besides, isn't cloning and genetic engineering humanoids like that not considered scientifically advisable or even legally allowed?
 
Pretty sure lots of women would sign up.

sir-gold said:
We already have that, it's called "old people who can't drive faster than a horse".
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Everything above 50 km/h excessive and dangerous in a city imho. I just wanted to say this.

With that said, I fail to see the correlation between slow driving and coping with progress. The arrogance is staggering with this one.
 
Human genetics is somewhat of a taboo, or at the very least very sensitive subject, where its difficult to get truly objective information.

All the studies I had read so far is that Neanderthal went extinct simply because they interbred with other humans that migrated into the region, which would merely make them a subspecies.

No one is wowed by the fact that a white Australian settler can interbreed with an Australian aborigine, but compare a stereotypical Western skeleton with that of an Australian Abo and then perhaps an African Pygmy and if it were any other animal it would be without question classified as related but distinct subspecies. But again because its such a sensitive subject, everything possible is done to minimize the recognition of racial differences within the homo species.

TL;DR version: Neanderthal baby is nothing special, and there are already too many humans on the planet. Spend the money on cloning and breeding mammoths, so I can have mammoth ribs like in the Flinstones.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Yep. We robbed, raped and murdered them. Assimilated porperly.
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In the fantasy propoganda world. :D

In actuallity it might have been a whole bunch of different things. They kicked humans asses and liked human women (being bigger and stronger) so they reproduced with them more meaning each generation got less and less Neanderthal. :p
 
BTW, if you think that there are more obvious differences in the humans below than there are between recognized subspecies of NAmerican Wolf (top) and European Wolf (bottom), then YOU'RE A RACIST AND WILL BURN IN ETERNAL HELLFIRE! :p

8400443366_3e4d7bcd09_z.jpg
[/img]http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8223/8400457722_fbecc05c43_z.jpg[/img]
 
Was it ever explained why we're not given an edit window of even 30 seconds? Ugh!
8400457722_fbecc05c43_z.jpg
 
And if they are super-strong/super-smart, we're laying the groundwork for our own extinction.

Peter Watts wrote a science-fiction novel called Blindsight, in the backstory of which it was discovered that Vampires were actually a pre-historic offshoot of the human race that went extinct around the time we discovered architecture. Some scientists got the bright idea of bringing them back using cloning and genetic engineering. Being more intelligent than human beings, naturally they were gradually given more and more responsibility in our society. Having a predator of Humanity in charge of Humanity...yeah, that went about as well as you can imagine.
 
dgz said:
Pretty sure lots of women would sign up.



Everything above 50 km/h excessive and dangerous in a city imho. I just wanted to say this.

With that said, I fail to see the correlation between slow driving and coping with progress. The arrogance is staggering with this one.
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Wait...what? Are you seriously arguing that anything above 30mph in a city is dangerous? I hope this is a troll because that is seriously the dumbest thing I have ever heard.

Not really sure we need a neanderthal baby, we have plenty of modern humans who clearly come from a lineage that crossbred with them. Beyond that though, I say go for it!
 
I think there are some places we just shouldn't go. We're not talking about cloning an animal like a mammoth here,we're talking about a thinking,reasoning being who'd no doubt live their lives as a lab experiment,and looked on as a curiosity by some and an abomination by religious zealots. Just because we can do it,doesn't mean we should. Some day maybe we'll grow up enough as a race to know that.
 
dgz said:
Pretty sure lots of women would sign up.



Everything above 50 km/h excessive and dangerous in a city imho. I just wanted to say this.

With that said, I fail to see the correlation between slow driving and coping with progress. The arrogance is staggering with this one.
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That was supposed to be a joke.....
 
michael.pa2 said:
I think there are some places we just shouldn't go. We're not talking about cloning an animal like a mammoth here,we're talking about a thinking,reasoning being who'd no doubt live their lives as a lab experiment,and looked on as a curiosity by some and an abomination by religious zealots. Just because we can do it,doesn't mean we should. Some day maybe we'll grow up enough as a race to know that.
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Some day we will grow up enough as a race that we won't have religious zealots.
 
You should do it, Domo. It might bring back memories of your Neanderthal childhood. :p
 
I wonder who will be in charge of this childs medical and psychological needs. A vet or a physician? Paleopsychology and Doctor of Prehistoric Medicine, D.P.M. New fields to study...great....there is already a shortage of medical doctors and psychologists for the rest of us...the little bastard, (Well, technically), is already competing for our resources...hmmm, dumb and strong...think of any jobs they could replace humans at? So what a nightmare...BUT...

I doubt there will be allowed to be a "mass market" for these neos, just think of the mess...will they be things, slaves, equals under the law? I hope we have learned enough from the past, and many SF stories, to not let that happen....so, in reality this will be a small thing...a few neos to play with each other...to the best of our feeble ability they will be treated like gold...trouble may be figuring out what they need/want.Yes, there will be psychological stress for them...it is presumably stressful to be different....ask a foreigner or a disfigured person, or a homosexual...they will be ok.

This will happen in some shape or form because people are curious. 100,000 years from now homo sapiens may be recreated by some future race...YeeeHaaaa, hope they still have beer. Then 100,000 yrs later the same thing may happen, but of course way before all this time goes by we will be able to create virtual worlds to do these experiments in...Some actual physicists believe we may be in one of these simulations now...

Could cloning a neanderthal bring about serious societal introspection, yes, this will be good in the long run. Could cloning a neo be a disaster for homo sapiens as a species, possible, quite unlikely.

Lets just make sure whoever is in charge read the book about the vampires mentioned above, and maybe watched the new Planet of the Apes movie.

You can't stop progress.
 
I was thinking... what if the Neanderthal is much stronger and faster yet less intelligent? Would people choose to have the Neanderthal just so their child could be a professional athlete?
 
Dammit, there's no religious zealotry in stating that maybe we should leave the human genome alone.

Most of the world's major religions don't specifically spell out whether dabbling in genetic manipulation is a "sin" in that particular religion. But we are getting away from the issue already...

The issue is one of common sense. Look, scientists LOVE to see what can be done simply because it CAN be done. That's healthy. It's how you learn. But you have to consider the issues.

This is one easy example:

We truly have no idea how most of the genetic markers that make up a DNA strand work. Without fully understanding that first we could cause a horror story by cloning this ancient "man". Are we going to allow this person to procreate? Should we? His rights as a living human being say yes, absolutely.

Now what if we find out several generations later that a devastating genetic trait has just been reintroduced in the general population? It may be too late to find all those people. Then what do we do? Beyond that, what if you CAN find them all? Do we sterilize them against their will? KILL THEM? WHAT?

We have no respect for life at all if we walk down a path of that sort.

And producing a human being as a lab experiment? That's just plain wrong on a million levels completely separate from which religion you subscribe to. It sets a precedent that we can't turn back from. What if YOU were the one born to be a lab rat?
 
MethylONE said:
I was thinking... what if the Neanderthal is much stronger and faster yet less intelligent? Would people choose to have the Neanderthal just so their child could be a professional athlete?
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Considering the intelligence demonstrated by some athletes in the news recently,I think some already have.:D
 
Aren't their laws on human cloning? I know it's a neanderthal but still... of course I might have my sci-fi movie plots and reality crossing wires here :D

"Nature finds a way"
"They had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction"
 
If it's a boy he'll be a handful for his parents when it comes to dating.

"Whacks woman over the head with club then drags her to his parents basement cave." :p
 
There are many ethical problems associated with this (most having to do with the human cloning aspect), but it's an intriguing idea and we would learn a lot from studying living neanderthals. I say do it. This isn't some crazy dude cloning his dead child, it's bringing back another subspecies of human which would vastly expands our human knowledge.
 
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