Monday, February 16, 2009

FOXP2!!!

No time for a real post, I have a midterm on the Socioeconomic applications of GIS in one hour. Basically I just want you all to read this article from the BBC discussing the preliminary results of the newly sequenced Neanderthal genome, and please focus on what the anthropologists are saying, not so much the reporter. The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is......awesome.

I also like the fact that Prof. Paabo from the Max Planck Institute has put the the kibosh on cloning a Neanderthal from this sequence, for the time being anyway. Argue with me if you will, but cloning a Neanderthal would be...a bad idea to say the least...not to mention ethically problematic.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

An interesting article that actually does discuss the stuff you are trying to spark! For the short and sweet of it go to John Hawks blog (the second link)

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/why-not-bring-a-neanderthal-to-life/#comments

http://johnhawks.net/node/1863

Lars Anderson said...

the first article is interesting, but the author seems make a large assumption that neanderthals are more 'primitive' than us...I feel that cloning a neanderthal would provide up with nothing except for new physiological insights (and there would be some ethical issues with bringing a neanderthal to life only to turn it into a lab rat). As far as behaviour goes, unless we take the "clan of the cave bear" approach, the process of social learning the neanderthal baby would go through (as the initial neanderthal would have to be raised by current modern humans)would make it socially more modern human than neanderthal (or at least having behaviour strongly influenced by modern humans, if we take the 'primitive' neanderthal perspective) ...so ethical questions aside, would we really learn much about neanderthal social behaviour? or would the context of the research itself completely defeat the purpose?