"Oh, no. Not *those* people again. We had such trouble with them last time."
Author: Jimmy Akin
Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin
Indeed. I’m simultaneously fascinated and horrified.
If they are at all like the cloned Neanderthals in Jasper Fforde’s novels, I’m all for it.
I hope they do… then finally see to their shock that Neanderthals were really normal human beings all along… which we already know given their lifestyles and because they created art, spoke, and bured their dead.
Then the ‘Neanderthal man’ can join the rest of the apeman cast along with the ‘Piltdown man’/homo erectus which turned out to be one of the greatest hoaxes in the sad history of evolution ‘science.’
And then do what with them, even if it would be possible to clone them?
Put them in reservations? The circus? A private island? Beverly Hills 90210?
I think some scientists should start using their heads a little bit more.
Besides: people (read: anti-christians and the like) are bashing the Beckams for having a 4th child and screaming ‘overpopulation’ and now they want to bring an whole new race of human(oid) beings (back) to life?
Well -100000 for consistency 😛
The hoax called Piltdown Man is not and never was considered the same as Homo erectus. That’s a common misunderstanding due to the similarity in sound to Peking Man, which is an example of Homo erectus.
I definitely am opposed to cloning Neanderthals. Either they were human beings and so cloning them would be inherently immoral, or they were animals so much closer to humans in appearance and behavior than any extant animals that it would be extremely confusing to suddenly encounter them again. Imagine if every other vertebrate in the world had been extinct for tens of thousands of years before the beginning of written history (so the only animals we had were insects, mollusks, worms, etc.) and suddenly we encountered a gorilla or chimpanzee. How would we know how to relate to it? How much would it seem to challenge our sense of human uniqueness?
In either case cloning something which we are not sure is quite human seems like an extremely bad idea.
My mistake, I got them mixed up…
Either way, even Peking Man, etc. are all fanciful ideas built on next to no evidence as desparate grasps to find so called missing links. Either anything they found was either parts of animals existing today, or simply those of a human being, even ones with physical deficiencies or disease, or were simply faulty reconstructions. As for the case of Neanderthals, it’s pretty clear that they had culture and made artifacts, proving they were completely human beings.
I agree that Neanderthals were real people. Cloning them would be disrespectful, and a violation of their human dignity.
Definitely opposed-for all the reasons given by posters above:
violation of human dignity,ect. Besides, it would be terribly unfair to the individual cloned,as he/she would not have the immunities to modern diseases that we modern humans have.
Ismael, you are absolutely right-Don’t bring new people in the old fashioned way-but cloning,creating animal human hybrids, ect is OK.
I am a long time (40+ years) student of paleoanthropology and a Field Associate of the Museum of Paleontology, U.C., Berkeley. More importantly I am a devout Catholic who takes and follows the Magisterium of the Church very seriously; in the authentic tradition of Blessed Cardinal Newman. Based on solid continuing genome investigations it has been well established that modern Eurasian people (not sub-Saharan people) on average include, at least, 10% Neanderthal genes in their genetic make-up. In this respect, Neanderthals are us! As previous comments have stated, Neanderthal people attained cultural and religious behaviors that are unique to that of contemporary humans. They were/are completely human. Therefore, it would be gravely immoral (a crime against humanity) to clone these people. There are abundant fossil remains of the hominid that scientists classify as Homo erectus. They were advanced proto-humans; not humans. Scientists sometimes refer to H. erectus as human. They do this because they are generally theologically un-informed and therefore their language and discussion of human phylogeny is philosophically and theologically sloppy. Very, very few scientists who study human “evolution” have a clue as to what factors are distinctively, and therefore diagnostically, unique to human beings. Their pronouncements about human origins, et al. need to be taken with a couple of pounds of salt. By the way, great question Jimmy.