If we clone neanderthals, will they have legal rights?

mrow said:
Well chimps are close enough that we could interbreed as well, but the offspring wouldn't be viable. By subspecies then, do you mean a breed of sorts? Such as dalmations versus poodles?
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To answer your question, subspecies is just another taxonomic rank, like subfamily or suborder.
 
Sam mentioned things like signing an apartment lease, etc. That's not guaranteed to all humans, no. If they were deemed too "different" in any way, then probably not. Gays can't get married, people with severe mental handicaps can't drive or rent their own apartment.
 
mrow said:
Sam mentioned things like signing an apartment lease, etc. That's not guaranteed to all humans, no. If they were deemed too "different" in any way, then probably not. Gays can't get married, people with severe mental handicaps can't drive or rent their own apartment.
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According to SAM infertile people aren't human.

The point is, if they are human then they will have basic human rights. Once that is established they will have to go through the same processes as the rest of us (in an ideal world of course).
 
If they were pretty much human, they would have rights. The only reason why not is if there were retarted or something, but from what I have read, they were probably smarter.
 
Enmos said:
According to SAM infertile people aren't human.

The point is, if they are human then they will have basic human rights. Once that is established they will have to go through the same processes as the rest of us (in an ideal world of course).
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I'm not talking about SAM's inane ramblings. I'm saying that she wasn't merely talking about basic human rights. So for those, I'd say no, they probably wouldn't.
 
mrow said:
I'm not talking about SAM's inane ramblings. I'm saying that she wasn't merely talking about basic human rights. So for those, I'd say no, they probably wouldn't.
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But then the discussion becomes, "How true are humans to their own ethics ?"
We all know the answer to that one.
 
mrow said:
Haha. Exactly.
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;)
I'd say this discussion is pretty moot to begin with.
No one really knows what they were like, let alone how we would react to them. Especially if they would be too much like us. I think we could handle a very animal-like Neanderthal, but one that is in virtually all respects human might not be as easy to accept.
 
spidergoat said:
Yeah, but their legal rights are held by a caretaker, they cannot sign contracts, for instance.
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True, but at least there will be the possibility of having legal rights assigned to them.
At this point we just don't know enough about what they were like to make any further assumptions.
 
maybe a pure breed one would be better than the half breed you had so far. Of course he\she couldnt be any worse:p
 
Oh, I dunno...imagine a neanderthal in control of the nuclear stockpile of America:eek: Oh, wait, I forgot we've already had Richard Nixon and various other noddies of such ilk.:D
 
i was more thinking of this:p

pic81.jpg


pic66.jpg

http://www.bushorchimp.com/pics.html
 
Seriously though, if a neanderthal and human had a child, would it be any smarter than its neanderthal parent?

On second thought, that depends a lot on how smart the human parent is as well.:D
 
From the article....

When the full Neanderthal genome is in hand, could it be made to produce the living creature its information specifies? Ethical considerations aside, Dr. Pääbo said, Neanderthals could not be generated with existing technology.
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This is correct.

Dr. Church of Harvard disagreed. He said he would start with the human genome, which is highly similar to that of Neanderthals, and change the few DNA units required to convert it into the Neanderthal version.

This could be done, he said, by splitting the human genome into 30,000 chunks about 100,000 DNA units in length. Each chunk would be inserted into bacteria and converted to the Neanderthal equivalent by changing the few DNA units in which the two species differ. The changed lengths of DNA would then be reassembled into a full Neanderthal genome. To avoid ethical problems, this genome would be inserted not into a human cell but into a chimpanzee cell.

The chimp cell would be reprogrammed to embryonic state and used to generate, in a chimpanzee’s womb, a mutant chimp embryo that was a Neanderthal in many or most of its features.
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What a complete load of rubbish! :eek:

Firstly, with current technology it is barely possible to synthesise and stitch together the smallest bacterial genome. The idea that anyone can stitch 30,000 different 100,000 base pair fragments into a complete human genome (after having performed in vitro mutagenesis on many of the fragments beforehand, mind you!) is pure fantasy.

Secondly, even if this was achieved, how does this guy think he will insert all these artificial/modified chromosomes into a chimp cell nucleus whilst removing all the chimp chromosomes? Again, genome substitution is something only achieved in bacteria AFAIK, and only then because bacteria have a single circular genomic chromosome and no nuclear organelle.

I know that Dr. Church knows he is talking science fiction. :rolleyes: He is using the mass general media to raise his own profile. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that but at times I think this sort of thing does a disservice to science. It only serves to confuse people as to what is possible in reality and what is not. Thanks to nonsense like this from Dr. Church and others, most people seem to think that we can clone an organism simply because we know its genome sequence.

We can’t. :mad:
 
um HR i dont actually disagree with much of what you said but as far as stripping the DNA out of a fertalised egg and replacing it, i thought people HAD done it. Of course the subsitution was human to human but im sure there is a thread around here about that being an option for women with mitocondrial disorders so that they arnt pased on to the child
 
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