Neanderthal Ethics

Feb 18, 2009 Alun Politics, Science, The Past 7 Comments Anthropology, Archaeology, Ethics, Neanderthals, Philosophy

Here’s an oddity I star­ted think­ing about fol­low­ing a tweet by Dr Kiki who poin­ted to this art­icle Return of the Neander­thals: If we can resur­rect them through fossil DNA, should we?. The strange thing was my reac­tion to this. The answer seems obvi­ous. I thought I’d missed the boat on this when The Philo­soph­ers’ Magazine blog covered it. Again the author, Jean Kazez, missed the obvi­ous objec­tion, so I left it in a com­ment, and it was eas­ily dis­missed — or rather ignored. See­ing as two people see no prob­lem with what I see as an insur­mount­able prob­lem I have to be open to the idea I’m being dog­matic.

So here’s the ques­tion: if we could use the DNA of the recently dis­covered Neander­thal gen­ome (Jo Badge has given me good reas­ons why we couldn’t) would it be eth­ical to resur­rect the spe­cies? Exactly how is a prob­lem, but see­ing as we’re invent­ing sci­ence for the sake of a thought exper­i­ment let’s pre­tend a chim­pan­zee could carry the Neander­thal foetus to term, so there’s no Hom.Sap mater­ial involved.

Now the dis­cus­sion seems to be focussed on what eco­lo­gical niche it could fit into. As Jean Kazez asks should it be in a zoo or Har­vard? At this point my men­tal pro­cesses derail, because there doesn’t seem to be much grasp of what you’re cre­at­ing or why.

First of all you’re cre­at­ing a human. The spe­cies name for Neander­thals is Homo neander­thalen­sis (or even Homo sapi­ens neander­thalen­sis). That homo pre­fix marks them as human. Jean Kazez in a reply com­ment doesn’t seem to accept refer­ring to Neander­thals as human as they split from mod­ern humans, well the fig­ure Kazez uses is 300 kyr. It could be as early as 600 kyr with Neander­thals evolving from Homo heidel­ber­gen­sis. There is room to argue how human they were com­pared to Homo sapiens.

There’s cer­tainly evid­ence of com­plex hunt­ing pat­terns. Neander­thals worked as a team. They prac­ticed butchery. Rather than drag a whole car­cass home, they chopped it up and took back the best bits. Using fire might seem archetypal stone age tech­no­logy, but when you think about what means in terms of plan­ning, car­ry­ing and con­serving fire that’s clearly a com­plex men­tal task. You could argue that they show little evid­ence of sym­bolic thought with a lack of art, but there does seem to be some evid­ence of art. No as much as Homo sapi­ens would pro­duce in the Upper Palaeo­lithic, but if you look at what Homo sapi­ens was doing as art in Europe at the same time as the Neander­thals, their record is pretty lousy too. Africa seems to be the place for early art. I’m not claim­ing that Neander­thals were all poten­tial Ein­steins, but they’re clearly closer to mod­ern humans than chimps in terms of cog­nit­ive power. How close? Well that’s the why question.

Did Neander­thals have lan­guage? The genetic data shows they had a FoxP2 gene which is a gene con­nec­ted to the devel­op­ment of lan­guage in mod­ern humans. Steve Mithen recently made an inter­est­ing case for Neander­thals hav­ing lan­guage. There’s the mat­ter of how com­plex their social beha­viour could be. How many orders of inten­tion­al­ity could they cope with? That’s think­ing along the lines where I think that you know that I believe the FBI are watch­ing me (3 orders, we struggle at 5 or 6). There’s a lot that exper­i­ment­a­tion on a Neander­thal could tell us about human­ity, and that’s where my objec­tion lies. The pre­cise bio­lo­gical sub­strate doesn’t mat­ter, the fea­ture we’re inter­ested in is their human­ity. It’s their human­ity we value, So I see the ques­tion as:

Put like that, there’s no way you’d get it past an eth­ics com­mit­tee. Iron­ic­ally the cre­ation of a breath­ing being from human mater­ial, even if (or espe­cially if?) it’s fully human mater­ial it way bey­ond the cre­ation of human-animal hybrid embryos. We’re talk­ing about the cre­ation of a being which we expect to be self-aware and demon­strably intel­li­gent. John Hawks has poin­ted to an inter­est­ing post by by John Tier­ney, who also sees this as a no-brainer, but in the oppos­ite dir­ec­tion. He makes a couple of ser­i­ous points, one good and one moronic.

If we dis­covered a small band of Neander­thals hid­den some­where, we’d do everything to keep them alive, just as we try to keep alive so many other endangered pop­u­la­tions of humans and anim­als — includ­ing man-biting mos­qui­toes and man-eating polar bears.

This is inter­est­ing, because at first blush we would. On the other hand I don’t know a single anthro­po­lo­gist that would recom­mend pick­ing up an uncon­tac­ted tribe from the Amazon and drop­ping them in a secure hold­ing facil­ity for study. If we did find a small band of Neander­thals some­where I think we’d be look­ing a secure nature reserve, not a lab. Fur­ther, the Neander­thals would — after an amaz­ingly bit­ter and acri­mo­ni­ous argu­ment — be con­tac­ted by an anthro­po­lo­gist on their very best behaviour.

The other line is cringeworthy.

If our spe­cies dis­ap­peared and a smarter spe­cies took over the planet, I’d take the offer to be resur­rec­ted just on the the­ory that being alive beats being dead.

Human clones already exist. They’re called twins. Your clone if it was cre­ated in the future would not be not be you, it would be an arti­fi­cial twin. So would you want a twin sis­ter cre­ated, so she could live out her life as a lab specimen?

I don’t know if the eth­ics of resur­rect­ing Neander­thals is the mod­ern equi­val­ent of count­ing angels dan­cing on the head of a pin or not. I’m really not con­vinced that a Neander­thal could be cre­ated using a chimp egg with cur­rent tech­no­logy for $30 mil­lion as George Church at Har­vard claims, but appears to a rap­idly expand­ing field. Even if one could be cre­ated you wouldn’t learn much about Neander­thals, because all the Neander­thal cul­ture, her­it­age and extel­li­gence has been lost. In some ways it would be like adopt­ing an Arab baby bring­ing it to the Vat­ican, hav­ing Nuns raise it and then expect­ing to learn about Islam. What the eth­ical ques­tion does do I think is tell us some­thing about how we think about human­ity. From what I can tell Kazez and Tier­ney have a nar­row and paro­chial view of what it means to be human. Altern­at­ively it could be that I have a rigid and inflex­ible view of eth­ics which doesn’t account for grey areas. If you think so, feel free to tell me where I’m wrong in the com­ment box below.