human nature
Return of the Neanderthals
If we can resurrect them through fossil DNA, should we?
By William Saletan
Posted Monday, Nov. 24, 2008, at 7:57 AM ET
Here's the next question in the evolution debate: We know roughly how
the sequence of life ran forward in time. What about running it
backward? How would you feel about rewinding human evolution to a
species that's almost like us, but not quite?
Last week in Nature, scientists reported major progress in sequencing
the genome of woolly mammoths. They reconstructed it from two
fossilized hair samples. One was 20,000 years old; the other was
65,000 years old. Now, according to Nicholas Wade of the New York
Times, biologists are discussing "how to modify the DNA in an
elephant's egg so that after each round of changes it would
progressively resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The final-stage egg
could then be brought to term in an elephant mother."
Cool, huh? But that's not the half of it. Wade notes:
The full genome of the Neanderthal, an ancient human species
probably driven to extinction by the first modern humans that entered
Europe some 45,000 years ago, is expected to be recovered shortly. If
the mammoth can be resurrected, the same would be technically possible
for Neanderthals.
In fact, Wade points out, there are good reasons to re-create a
Neanderthal: "No one knows if Neanderthals could speak. A living one
would answer that question and many others."
Whoa there, says Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops: "Catholic teaching opposes all human cloning, and
all production of human beings in the laboratory, so I do not see how
any of this could be ethically acceptable in humans." Wade concedes
that "there would be several ethical issues in modifying modern human
DNA to that of another human species."
Note the qualifiers: modern human DNA. Another human species. As this
uncomfortable reality of the past becomes a future
prospecttransitional creatures between human and nonhumanthe "human
dignity" framework starts to look a bit shaky. George Church, a
leading geneticist, suggests (in Wade's paraphrase) that scientists
could "modify not a human genome but that of the chimpanzee," bringing
it "close enough to that of Neanderthals, [with] the embryo brought to
term in a chimpanzee." No human clones or products involved. At least,
no "modern" humans. This leaves the question of whether we're entitled
to mess around in the lab with "another human species." But it's hard
to see how the bishops and other religious critics of biotechnology
can plunge into this area, having drawn a tight moral line around our
species.
Every serious scientist knows that we and other animals evolved from
the same ancestors. The real question today is whether to put our DNA
and theirs back together. Until now, that question has been raised in
the form of human-animal hybrids made in labs for research. You can
argue that these are somehow wrong because they're newfangled and
artificial. But what can you say about Neanderthals? They were made by
nature, not industry. In fact, we're the industrial villains who
apparently wiped them out. They're as natural as we are.
If we do this Church's way, I don't see how conservatives can object.
They didn't object last year when scientists announced the cloning of
rhesus macaque embryos. That, too, was the creation of nonhuman
primate life. Follow the human lineage three branches beyond the
primate order, and the rhesus macaques are still with us. Follow the
human line two more branches, and the chimps are still with us. One
more branch, and you're down to us and the Neanderthals. If it's OK to
clone a macaque and a chimp, it's pretty hard to explain why, at that
last fork in the road, you're forbidden to clone a Neanderthal.
Is the idea repugnant? Absolutely. But that's not because we'd be
defacing humanity. It's because we'd be looking at it.
William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of
Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2205310/
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