Full stop.

Based on what? Their genetic similarity to us? Fine, but if so, it's sort of hard to justify the things that are routinely done to chimps and other close evolutionary cousins. Or maybe you think they deserve rights because they can think and feel like we can. Well, how do you know? If they turn out to be incapable of speech, they may be no more capable of communicating their thoughts to us than a chimp is (and as noted above, chimps are routinely butchered for food or used as lab animals).

If you've got an argument to make, by all means, I'd like to learn from what you have to say. But making bold statements without any kind of supporting arguments doesn't teach anyone anything.

But making bold statements without any kind of supporting arguments doesn't teach anyone anything.

You mean like that one?

A statement of your opinion is in no way the equivalent of a simple fact. You've made the bold assertion so the burden is yours to support it.

If you look at the lot of mentally retarded people, you'll see that their rights are curtailed as a function of their adaptive abilities.

I'm sure the same would be true with neaderthals.

Should we bring them back? Absolutely not! I can't imagine the qualitative experience of a neanderthal raised under those conditions. Neither can anyone else, which is a big part of the problem.

But I wouldn't want the neanderthals to do it to me, either, were our situations reversed. The loneliness and isolation, surrounded by beings quite unlike me in form or thought, would be horrific.

And what if they turned out to have the musculature of an ape?

No thanks. The prospect is obscene.

A statement of your opinion is in no way the equivalent of a simple fact. You've made the bold assertion so the burden is yours to support it.

This is itself an unsupported assertion. Why do you get to make unsupported assertions and not me?

Since I am not familiar with any references that would support your assertion, I am wondering why you feel the way you do. You could try to explain why you believe a neanderthal would he the moral equivalent of a modern human. You could try to find philosophical or religious references to support that statement. That's generally how these things are done.

When people make bold assertions, they generally have some reason why. Some people don't bother with reason, but they can generally write everything they know on a bumper sticker. I am hoping that you aren't like that. People learn from having things shown or explained to them, not from listening to someone else's opinions.

I wonder why you assume that a neanderthal would necessarily be equivalent to a mentally retarded person, or to an advanced ape. Scientists are interested in neanderthals precisely because we don't know how much like modern humans they might have been.

Maybe they interbred with modern humans and simply lost their identity as a separate subspecies. Kind of like the Cherokee, who merely disappeared.

Maybe they weren't as intelligent or as adaptable as modern humans.

Maybe they had some moral qualms about killing animals and other humanoids for food or just for the heck of it.

Maybe their social structure didn't provide their children the protection they needed to grow up.

Maybe the modern humans decimated them with disease like the Europeans did to the previous immigrants to the US.

People learn from having things shown or explained to them, not from listening to someone else's opinions.

Evidence to support this assertion?

Their lack of language, and the impact this has on symbolic reasoning, is huge. The Neanderthals may have been very intelligent in some ways, and had some cultural sophistication, but the lack of language is a big deal.

That's why I made the analogy to mentally retarded humans. In the "best" case scenario for neanderthals, we end up with someone very intelligent, who we cannot communicate well with and do not understand. So change my comparison to an autistic person. It impacts our ability to identify with and undertand them.

And like it or not, that's the basis upon which we grant rights, if for no other reason than it impacts the individual's ability to function in our world.

Hey, didja' hear about the resurgence of whaling?

Oh btw - I don't think humans decimated them with disease. If I had to guess, I'd say we actively exterminated them. Looking at our own history, it seems the most plausible explanation for their demise.

"If you look at the lot of mentally retarded people, you'll see that their rights are curtailed as a function of their adaptive abilities."

>>Not that I'm aware. Their priveleges, perhaps-for example, we likely be able to to restrict a neanderthal's ability to secure a license to operate a motor vehicle--but unless they've been found incompetent on an individual basis by a qualified judicial court (in which case a guardian would be assigned to act in their interests re: medical decisions, etc.) they possess the same rights you or I do.

Or would a Neanderthal be assumed non-human from a rights perspective, in the same way primates, big-brained sea-mammals and elephants are not granted rights?

But even if they are accorded human rights, it will inevitably fall to a human guardian to protect those rights. Can you imagine a more paternalistic act than assuming it's ok to clone a neanderthal? Yeah, turns out I can - to pretend that a human is in a position to make decisions on that Neanderthal's behalf.

The world has moved on without Neanderthals. What enormous hubris it would take, to bring them back.

Toward extending basic rights toward non-human species. The Spanish parliament, for example, recently voted to extend legal rights to apes.

And if we view human rights as applying to all ‘humans’ as a class, then Neanderthals must be considered to possess them: they’re members of genus homo, although not a sub-species of homo sapiens (modern humans).

I think the larger question is whether or not the experiment would justify the necesary resources expended--I don't think simply resolving the issue of language is sufficient. Quite simply, ethical considerations aside, it's just not enough bang for the bucks.

My sentiment exactly, Fielding. While genetically, the ethical issues might be less troubling than with human cloning, the situational issues are even more so. Maybe there's a nuanced argument capturing something I'm missing, but as I understand the issue now, cloning a neanderthal would be something that only a Nazi scientist could do. It's too cruel to consider.

to whatever Gods may be, that Homo Fantasticus has much better things to do, and much, much greater compassion, than to clone me in ten or twenty thousand some-odd years.

Money isn't the issue.