Cloned Neanderthals?

mrbbrad - 2010-02-10 3:17 PM maybe we can clone some punctuation marks

gearboy - 2010-02-10 4:27 PM Judging by some of the people I've met, I thought we already had.

ChineseDemocracy - 2010-02-10 4:18 PM What a silly concept, "neanderthal."  My Intelligent Design books clearly explain there's no such thing...they were just very strong humans. 

Seriously, if cloning a neanderthal would benefit mankind in some way, I'm all for it...likewise with humans...only if it will benefit mankind.  I could care less if it hurt people's feelings.  If there is a high probability something like that would help improve life as we know it, where's the problem?

ride_like_u_stole_it - 2010-02-10 4:24 PM

Four little words

Tag-team Neanderthal wrestling

ride_like_u_stole_it - 2010-02-10 2:24 PM

Four little words

Tag-team Midget Neanderthal wrestling

Baowolf - 2010-02-12 12:24 PM

Um..playing God is usually not a good thing. 

Baowolf - 2010-02-12 12:24 PM

Um..playing God is usually not a good thing.  Cloning people... not a good thing.  Farming bodies for parts, not so good.  Harvesting partially born babies' brains for reasearch, not good.  Any use of power that causes humans to be slaves, used as body parts, experimented on against their will, inosent folks tortured for the "gains of science" so that rich folks can get transplants and live a few more years at the cost of another person's life.. not good. 

So if intelligent design is stupid... then what is the alternative.  That rocks and water just happened by chance to create all life as we know it? Have you ever tossed a couple rocks and some water in a jar and made a person?  Is not going to happen.  Odds of winning the lottery on 10 consecutive days is much higher. 

Baowolf - 2010-02-12 11:24 AM

Um..playing God is usually not a good thing.  Cloning people... not a good thing.  Farming bodies for parts, not so good.  Harvesting partially born babies' brains for reasearch, not good.  Any use of power that causes humans to be slaves, used as body parts, experimented on against their will, inosent folks tortured for the "gains of science" so that rich folks can get transplants and live a few more years at the cost of another person's life.. not good. 

So if intelligent design is stupid... then what is the alternative.  That rocks and water just happened by chance to create all life as we know it? Have you ever tossed a couple rocks and some water in a jar and made a person?  Is not going to happen.  Odds of winning the lottery on 10 consecutive days is much higher. 

Baowolf - 2010-02-12 12:24 PM

...

So if intelligent design is stupid... then what is the alternative.  That rocks and water just happened by chance to create all life as we know it? Have you ever tossed a couple rocks and some water in a jar and made a person?  Is not going to happen.  Odds of winning the lottery on 10 consecutive days is much higher. 

ChineseDemocracy - 2010-02-12 7:04 PM

...

Honestly, those who don't take the time to understand evolution are really doing themselves a disservice.  It's like folks back in the 1980's labeling computers as a fad that would surely fade away. 

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gearboy - 2010-02-12 7:56 PM

Seriously? This is what you think the theory is? That rocks and water turned magically into people? 

The early oceans were an organic soup of chemicals, not a bunch of rocks sitting in water.  How they became alive may still be a matter of some debate (and if you want to posit that the initial "spark of life" was god breathing life into non-living matter, that's fine.  I don't believe that's the case, but I don't know if I can explain it succinently). And that sort of reasoning was what led to (discredited and false) ideas of spontaneous generation.  If you leave some meat out on the counter for a few weeks, odds are very good that you will soon notice little worms on it.  See? Spontaneous generation of worms from dead meat!  And don't try to give some mumbo-jumbo about those being fly larvae - flies have wings, and those things are definitely worm-like.

It only takes one occurence of the chemical soup forming some sort of self-generating life to continue the process.  Life wants to live.  There have been many cataclysmic events destroying large percentages of all life.  One of the most interesting (to me) was the evolution of a cyanobacteria roughly 3 billion years ago, that lived in the then-iron rich oceans, and through a (then) novel process of photosynthesis, produced a waste product - oxygen.  Oxygen was highly toxic to most life forms; and it caused the iron in the oceans to oxidize, which at the time was an essential element for most life forms. As a result of this significant change in the composition of the atmosphere and oceans, over 90% of all life died.  And yet, living things rebounded, evolving adaptations to the environment that made them thrive.  The oxygen concentration was in fact even higher than it is today, enabling the growth of ginormous insects that could absorb this oxygen (the reason we don't have 9 foot centipedes anymore is that the O2 levels are about 10% lower than they were in the past - thank god! I freak at the little 3 inch jobbers in my laundry room!)

There are some theories of biogenesis that are sort of xenogenic - that some sort of metorite containing a hardy bacterial life form "seeded" the early oceans - but of course that still begs the question of where THAT life started. But it is a lot more complex than "throw some rocks in a jar of water".

1stTimeTri - 2010-02-12 9:11 PM

Bugs Bunny knows how it all begin, starting around 2:53 of this clip -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpyd0pPN-6I&feature=PlayList&p=32C26A6B19105E6A&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=99

Baowolf - 2010-02-12 9:58 PM  

I am all ears.  Explain how a lack of a creator, a lack of a universal moral code and a free license to do anything, anarchy, works for civilization and in how I should behave in life and in my next IM?