The new claim is that a woolly mammoth could be regenerated for as little as $10 million. The basic technique, as I understand it, is reconstructing the genome of the mammoth and modifying the DNA in the egg of a modern elephant and bringing the final-stage egg to term in an elephant mother. It is noted that the same will be possible with Neanderthals, as it is expected that their genome will be recovered and sequenced shortly.
I'd be happy to see this done in either case--and not just because, as a commenter notes, having killed them off we maybe have an obligation to bring them back. But what does it mean to "bring them back?" Sure, I want to know what a neanderthal looks like, but I'm more interested in what a neanderthal acts like, how they think, what they have to say, if indeed they can talk.
But it's not possible to resurrect what a neanderthal was like, because a lot of what made them neanderthals was being raised by other neanderthals. "Wild children" have a full complement of human DNA, but they're crippled as humans. Imagine assessing humanity based on the behavior of a child raised by baboons--or, for that matter, by really intelligent aliens.
That's less of a problem, but still a problem, for woolly mammoths, or any creature that cares for its young. Maybe we should concentrate on trilobytes.
Right. I want to preserve the California Condor, too, but a California Condor that thinks it's a turkey vulture, is raised by a turkey vulture and acts just like a turkey vulture is not really a California Condor. One of the general trends we've learned in zoology in the last half century is that many animals are much more dependent on parent-derived learning and socialization than we've previously thought. Very few animals operate purely on instinct. Animals aren't, in fact, purely genetically driven automatons that you can plunk down anywhere and have them act the way a natural population acts. "Culture" is too important.
Michael Crichton used to make that point, actually.
"We" killed them off? Oh really?
Now man must apologize for his desire to survive.
For the evolutionists, I guess modern man must apologize for the evolution that got us here.
Nothing new, liberals have been encouraging such lunacy for years.
Re: the Cal. Condor. I remember the ranger at the Grand Canyon mentioning how many cows they slaughter and leave out in the open for the handful of "wild" Condors to eat every year.
And also the number of failed pregnancies due to both parents not having the slightest clue of what to do.
It's pretty clear nurture has a huge impact based on what nature has given you. I don't know why that seems so controversial, but it is...
One thing that always fascinated me was that we're not much different then our for fathers that ran around Africa in killing animals and wearing furs. We have the same abilities they had.
We are different because we developed the ability to pass on collective information past one individuals lifetime.
It took us eons, be we figured out how to create a world wide net of information, and children today have access to even vaster libraries of shared pains, experiences, and history's then even 20 years ago.
The Greeks passed on knowledge from the Mesopotamians, the Romans the Greeks, and modern western culture, after a slow start due to no-nothing Christians bent on power, rediscovered the Romans.
It's kinda crazy to think how we've found ways to pass on information that we could never readily do with our genes.
The Greeks passed on knowledge from the Mesopotamians, the Romans the Greeks, and modern western culture, after a slow start due to no-nothing Christians bent on power, rediscovered the Romans.
Um, what? Greek and Roman knowledge only exists at all because it was preserved by "no-nothing" (sic) Christians in Byzantine and Western monasteries, with a supporting role played by Islamic scholars.
Kind of lonely to be the recreated Neanderthal kid! And if you can't interbreed with homo sapiens, you are going to have no kids of your own.
There's a big difference between creating a single individual, and a whole group large enough to sustain the species. You'd have to find a lot of fossil DNA for that.
This is independent of whether you want to risk the number of miscarriages and birth defects currently associated with cloning. I assume the risks of this kind of procedure are similar.
"...having killed them off we maybe have an obligation to bring them back."
Really? You'll have a tough time convincing someone like me of that. I didn't kill those mammoths off any more than I had anything to do with slavery, or the holocaust.......and I certainly am not taking any blame for those stains on human history.
I'd like to see the mammoth brought back. But I'd really hate to see it done with a neanderthal, mainly for the reasons MichaelG mentions. It seems really cruel to introduce a small number of an intelligent species into a world where they'll never really fit in.
But would taking human DNA and alter it to make it Neanderthal DNA mean that we are crippling a person?
I mean, the Neanderthal being created would have been a normal human if not modified. We can probably agree that making someone stupid by any means is crippling that person, even it is "for science" and we just really wanted to see how a Neanderthal, who is not as smart as us, would act.
Just asking.
Maybe so, but wouldn't it be fun to see how a Neanderthal would fare in a steel cage match against a UFC titleholder or a kickboxer or something?
I say we find a big verdant section of Canada or New Zealand or a similarly hospitable-yet-uninhabited country, cordon off a whole tribe's worth of resurrected mammoths and neanderthals there, and leave them alone for a few dozen millennia.
But seriously, I can imagine a fantastic sci-fi novel in which a dying humanity embarks on a last-ditch quest to clone its evolutionary forebears and plant them on some distant Goldilocks planet, in the desperate hope that in the coming eons their species will live on even as the Earth perishes.
Do Neanderthals have immortal souls? (assuming for the sake of the discussion that they were in fact a separate species, and not just a sub-species of homo sapiens)
And if you re-created one and then killed it, would you be guilty of murder, or just cruelty to animals?
fumphis: How do you know that isn't what happened already? I wonder where Earth(n-1) is now?
Maybe we did kill of the Neanderthals. No one really knows, but I suspect this planet is only big enough for one sentient species.
We should be careful about reviving our ancient enemies -- how do you know they didn't go extinct for a good reason? I'd bet the Neanderthals were real dicks, if the guys in the GEICO commercial are any indication.
They've already done it...
http://images.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=caveman+lawyer&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title
Imagine assessing humanity based on the behavior of a child raised by ... really intelligent aliens.
That's a really great book.
Cavemen are just like us--only better looking.
Bringing back ONE mammoth, for the sake of zoological study, is a good idea.
"Bring back" the woolly mammoth, in the sense of having vast wild herds of them roaming the planes of Russia, strikes me as a colossally STUPID idea, especially for anybody living in or around Russia.
I care about the well-being of humanity above all other species. Tell me a reason why we would better off with the mammoths walking among us, and I'll listen. Feeling ashamed that we drove them to extinction is not reason enough. We did that for a reason. They're f-ing MAMMOTHS, for crying out loud.
We hunted French monarchs into extinction, too. Should we be looking for a way to resurrect Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette? Or should we just say, despite the cold cruelty of it, we're probably better off if all those aristocrats stay beheaded?
We drove woolly mammoths into extinction (if indeed we did) because we wanted to eat them, not because they endangered us. Why not bring them back?
Bringing back ONE mammoth, for the sake of zoological study, is a good idea.
"Bring back" the woolly mammoth, in the sense of having vast wild herds of them roaming the planes of Russia, strikes me as a colossally STUPID idea, especially for anybody living in or around Russia.
If the first one is tasty, then it strikes me as a fantastic idea.
Bring them back so we can eat them again, Megan? I'm shocked that you, of all people, would suggest such a thing. ;-)
I supose you can look at the Neanderthal DNA and see if it codes for language ability. I imagine some rich person would sometime try it out. It would probably take place in Russia where there is a lot of cold area, Siberia. If I recall recall correctly, the Neanderthal's have a large lung capacity and look to have been adapted for movement in a cold, thin air environment. Talk about a difficult adolescent rebellion and individuation though.
What rights would the Neanderthals have? If they wished to leave the center they were raised in, would they be allowed to? Would they be allowed to vote, to file a lawsuit, to marry a human?
Would they be property like a dog or a cat or a cow or a chimp or a dolphin? Could we make them work, keep them as pets, keep them as slaves?
Meghan, would they have the same rights as humans? Let us say their IQs were in the 70 range would they have the same rights as retarded humans? We would appoint a guardian for them....
I can certainly imagine a revived specicies turning out to be an invasive one as well. We do enough damage by moving existing species to environments in which they don't belong, after all.
I think the movie based on ressurected species proving to be agressive, invasive competitors to established species was called "Jurrasic Park."
Still, the idea of going to the zoo and seeing a wooly mammoth is pretty awesome, so there's also that.
Neandertals were an intelligent species. I'd be pretty uncomfortable with "bringing them back". Sure it would be pretty cool for scientists and whatnot, but you just made a person who is intelligent (but not very smart) but may or may not have the capacity for language, reproduction, etc, and who would probably be strong enough to literally toss NFL linebackers around like bowling balls. It's pretty much a recipe for an ton of impossible moral situations in so many ways.
Bringing back a whole society of neandertals so they can live in some zoo and get filmed for documentaries... no thankee.
Let the 90's go, it was fun while it lasted. Trils were mean nasty creatures with no socially redeeming traits. Good Post, Thanks
Raf...excellent point. I'm thinking Spielberg as director. I'll have my people call yours, they can work out the details. See you on easy street.
"We drove woolly mammoths into extinction (if indeed we did) because we wanted to eat them, not because they endangered us. Why not bring them back?"
Sure. But the generally accepted wisdom is that this species, like most other Pleistocene Megafauna, died out due in largest part to climate change. So let's not make grand assumptions about duty and planetary stewardship, when all we're really talking about is satisfying our natural curiosity.
What rights would the Neanderthals have? If they wished to leave the center they were raised in, would they be allowed to? Would they be allowed to vote, to file a lawsuit, to marry a human?
Would they be property like a dog or a cat or a cow or a chimp or a dolphin? Could we make them work, keep them as pets, keep them as slaves?
Meghan, would they have the same rights as humans? Let us say their IQs were in the 70 range would they have the same rights as retarded humans? We would appoint a guardian for them....
And that host of questions is why we should not be considering "bringing back" anything with any remote amount of human sentience.
And if you re-created one and then killed it, would you be guilty of murder, or just cruelty to animals?
Just FYI, Neanderthals were human.
fumphis,
They've already written that book. It's called "man after man".
As far as bringing neanderthals back, this will result in lawsuits to grant them full human rights. If there is a fringe that argues that gorillas and/or chimps should have these rights, there will be a larger segment of society arguing that neanderthals should have them.
As far as bringing back mammoths are concerned, what exsisting species would they endanger? When mammoths became extinct, other species benefitted. If they come back, other species will have to compete with them. Do we want to do this? This isn't like reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone. Mammoths have been extinct for thousands of years. The ecosystems they were in have adapted to this.
And while I'd be interested in seeing mammoths in some type of natural habitat, I wouldn't want to live around them. This is starting to sound like the Savage Resorts of Brave New World. Romanticize nature and let others deal with the harshness of it.
The fossil and archaeological evidence associated with the Neanderthals is not inconsistent with modern humans, albeit they would have been an entire society of muscular basketball stars. As far as I know, the pupular mythology that they must have been some sort of subhuman and/or unintelligent race has nothing to back it except popular mythology -- which originated when the initial discovery was eagerly assumed to be that of some sort of early- or pre-hominid link.
"I'd be happy to see this done in either case--and not just because, as a commenter notes, having killed them off we maybe have an obligation to bring them back."
The dynamics of mass extinction are always complicated and the Terminal Pleistocene is no exception. Way more complicated than this. Please PLEASE just... stop talking about science. Between the fusion/fission and this I'm beginning to wonder if you ever really know what you're talking about.
Bring 'em all back -the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhino, the dire wolf , the North American cheetah, the saber-toothed cat. Clear out North Dakota or Manitoba, put them all there, and let's see what happens. Pleistocene Park, anyone?
Oh yeah, bring back Neanderthal too . If anything bad happens, well we'll just exterminate all over again. We humans are good at that.
I'd be happy to see this done in either case--and not just because, as a commenter notes, having killed them off we maybe have an obligation to bring them back.
Bizarre idea.
First of all I'm not sure how anyone could claim to know whether 'we' (some of our ancestors) truly 'killed them off'.
Second of all, 'killed them off' is a bit of a misnomer. Lifespans of individual animals are finite; all the wooly mammoths you're talking about would surely be dead by now either way, regardless of what humans of the time did or didn't do. What you mean to say is that wooly mammoths stopped having descendants. But why should existing humans feel obligated to 'bring back' some species of critter just because they stopped having descendants?
Now, I might be in favor of this revival exercise because it's interesting or even cool and fun, but there is no such 'obligation' and certainly not because 'we killed them off' which as I said is a flawed notion anyway.
Yes, we should bring them back to eat them! I want to know how a mammoth steak tastes. They were so good our ancestors ate them all.
A mammoth ranch -- I like it!
I'm glad you're willing to consider moral arguments outside of a possibly mistaken belief that we might be responsible for their demise.
A partly human neanderthal presents a gigantic array of moral and ethical issues which won't stop it from being done. I say partly human because the limited description of the process implies to me that there would be no guarantee that some human sequences would not be present in the manufactured egg.
For that matter a pure neanderthal presents plenty of those issues too.
Thankfully I think it is known they would be too slow to be NFL offensive linemen.
One other odd fact is that it is posited that red hair is an arifact of human neanderthal offspring.
Do Neanderthals have immortal souls?
No, but then, neither do people, so who cares?
The other answer is - sure, why not? If you're making up souls for humans, who's to say that Neanderthals didn't have them, too?
What if... the Neanderthals turned out to be SMARTER that we are, and they were sent extinct by heat exhaustion in a warming world, or tropical plagues or something?
Then, with the benefit of airconditioning and modern medicine allowing them to flex their mental muscles as well as their physical ones, we might find ourselves in REAL trouble.
Mammoths on the other hand... We need to do something with the land being revealed by shrinking glaciers in Greenland. And wouldn't they be spectacular?
Neither mammoths nor Neanderthals seem like the right species to *start* with. Elephants seem somewhat impractical as lab rats, and trying to create a sapient being before really mastering the techniques seems wrong.
How about some other critter that's recently gone extinct? Not too small either, in case it escapes from the lab.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_animals
If we're bringing back extinct species, how 'bout the dodo or those miniature horses, which would make great pets and produce good fertilizer for suburban 3-acre farms?
And as far as neanderthals, I'm not really sure they're extinct. Have any of you been to Maine recently? I'm totally convinced they voted for Susan Collins; something about her voice.
That wouldn't make it "partly human". Naturally occurring Neaderthal DNA would be almost entirely made up of the same genes you and I have. Chimp genes are 98% identical to humans and 85% of mouse DNA contains "human" genes. I forget the percentage, but a substantial portion of the DNA in baker's yeast consists of the same genes that make up our DNA. There's nothing special about human genes, we have genes in common with every living thing.
As far as culture, it's irrelevant to the main reason we'd bring them back: helping to learn what it is in our genes that makes us what we are. We know that what makes us smart, reasoning, math and language using creatures lies in that 2% genetic difference between humans and chimps, but only because we've been able to raise chimps in our envirionment to learn they're not capable of doing it. We now know the genetic difference between humans and Neaderthals is only a fraction of 1%, but that doesn't add to our self-knowledge because we can't put them into our environment to learn what their language and reasoning capabilities are.
Maybe we'd learn they weren't capable of grasping our language or abstract reasoning. Then we'd know the genes that give us those abilities are in that very tiny difference between our DNA and theirs. That 2% difference between us and chimps is still an awful lot of genes. If we could narrow that to the the difference between us and Neanderthals we'd be much closer to understanding what makes humans human.
The process described would result in a Neanderthal-Human chimera. The mitchondrial DNA would be human, and from the egg. There would also be a lot of cellular RNA and proteins in the egg that would mediate how the genes were expressed - there were stories in the press about this over the last couple of weeks. Our genes are not the whole story on how cells work.
Also, the "we're x% identical to Y" is a silly comparison. Most of our DNA is inactive - it's cruft left over from evolution. I can write a paragraph of 100 words and change two of them to completely alter the meaning of the paragraph. But 98% of the words were the same!
There's lots special about human genes. Intelligence, language, tool use, opposable thumbs - all in the same package is quite special.
ech is absolutely right. These creations will not be Neanderthals. They will be some sort of Neanderthal/human combination. Nuclear Neanderthal DNA will be put in a human egg. That egg will then divide and differentiate. But that egg will have human cell walls, ribosomes, mitochondria, golgi apparatus, etc. And of course, the mitochondria have their own replicating DNA, which will continue to be human DNA.
The egg will develop in a human womb, which means it will be bathed in human chemicals for the nine months or so that it takes to bring the creation to term.
If you put a Ford engine in a Chevy, is the result a Ford or a Chevy or neither or both? Is it something like Johny Cash's "One Piece at a Time"?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59H4S-a8Wj4
ech and Roger Sweeny are right, for both the Neanderthal and the woolly mammoth. There's a lot of important information in the egg, and in what proteins are wrapped around the DNA and which DNA sequences they are wrapped around. The people proposing this are, at best, horribly oversimplifying.
I hope the Chinese pick my DNA when they decide to bring back white people.