Where are the limits of human-animal rights?

How far should we extend consideration for animal rights, in particular with regard to chimpanzees or other 'higher' primates?  Views on this vary from people who argue about the necessity of using non-human primates to understand human disease, or behavior, or evolution, to the those who argue that as our nearest relatives, chimpanzees should enjoy the same rights that humans enjoy.  In fact, the New York Times had a story on Sunday about the first chimp suing its owner for abuse.  Federal regulations have changed on this over the years, currently erring on the side of more rights than fewer, but this hasn't always been so.

Now, Svante Paabo, a pioneer of sequencing ancient DNA (from fossils) and the first and one of the major sequencers of Neanderthal fossil DNA, has written a thoughtful NY Times piece about the rather culpably casual rhetoric about 'cloning' a Neanderthal that has followed the sequencing of several Neanderthal genomes.  The  widespread headlines by promoters of this sexy idea usually omit some important technical details that clearly show that the idea is not actually cloning a Neanderthal (Svante briefly itemizes some of this), but that's not our point here.

Neanderthal; BBC website

The Neanderthal is treated in the usual stories, even by prominent investigators who should know better, as some object of study, as an 'it'.  But we know that Neanderthals and other populations that once existed, or at least are identified as populations by some sample fossil finds, could interbreed with the direct ancestors of us modern humans, or is that the way to put it?

If 'they' bred with early 'us', then what makes them 'they' rather than others of 'us'?  The answer is that this is a misrepresentation of the population dynamics.  What happened, based on current knowledge and interpretation, is that two groups of our ancestors met and inter-bred.  The only reason one is called 'them' and the other 'us' is that the vast majority of the DNA you and we carry around seems  to have come from the ancestors being referred to as our own, and only minority from the Neanderthals who are often treated as a truly different kind of life--a different species.  This shows some modern arrogance on our part, as if they were some sort of strange interlopers into our noble lineage.  Instead, they were just part of our lineage.

Is old-fashioned racism lurking beneath the jolly stories here?
Of course, in our current scientific system, including news and other attention-seeking media, we quickly see evaluations of what functionally important genes 'they' gave to 'us'?  (Anything we gave to them must have been rather devastating, if the interpretation that they all died out is correct).  Whether the list is of 'good' or 'bad' genes, does the assignment of such genes as being owned by one or the other ancestral group an unmixed scientific assessment?

Or, by classifying the groups as us and them, and then saying 'they' had this or that genetic variant that they gave to 'us', are we carelessly indulging in just another form of group generalization, another form or value-judgment racism?  Do we blame their inferior nature for the 'bad' genes, for type 2 diabetes, say, that we got by some careless intermixture with 'them'?  If genes they gave us were superior (say, high-IQ genes such as found in certain racial groups today--you can fill in the blanks, we're sure), then why did they die out and we persevere?  If we won but they had the superior genes at the time of encounters, then why doesn't this make people think twice about ritualized Darwinist assertions of how who adapted to what?

If it was a few of their good genes mixing with our overall-better genomes, then why didn't the offspring, who were 50-50 in terms of ancestry, lend superiority to their part of the interacting groups?  Of course, you can make up any story you want, especially if you believe that the 'disease' or 'superior' variants really are so--we readily know how vulnerable GWAS and other genetic value assessments are proving to be, to over-generalization.

So perhaps there's the additional issue not just of animal/human distinctions, but of careless talk reinforcing the racism always latent in the human heart.

But even that is not our point today.

What about the clones?
Let's suppose that the modern Dr Frankensteins can bring the Neanderthal 'It' to life.  How will that be done?  First, with present-day technology, there will have to be a very low-tech participant besides the Neanderthal DNA: some woman to carry the fetus.  It probably can't be a chimp, should one 'volunteer', because Neanderthals were so essentially human that a human uterus,  pelvis, and physiology would be needed to carry the new baby.  Well, there are probably plenty of people who'd volunteer for the job.  So, forgetting that minor obstacle, what will occur once the venerable Dr F has the bundle of joy in his lab?

Will it be 'human'?  Svante likens the cloning to doing that with his deceased grandparent's DNA and points out how rather spooky and wrong that would be.  Here, there would be no personally known relative involved.  But would the cloner, our kindly Dr F, have ownership of the baby?  Would the baby be considered an animal or a person?

So, would the beneficent Dr F have the right to keep little It in a cage?  Or, say, put It on display in his lab or in the (say, naming no names) nearby Boston zoo?  Would It be housed alone, or with some other animals.....and if so, which, and which type of animals as It's roommate(s)?

Would scientists have the right to poke, probe, and experiment with Neando?  To draw blood or even snip out a few tissue biopsies when they wanted to (often enough to generate a stream of Nature papers)?   Subject it to CT or fMRI scans?  Why not?  After all, this is science! 

Or, alternatively, would little Neando automatically have civil rights as a human?  Born in some august university's city here, would it have citizenship?  Would it have the right to a real foster home, with human parents?  To be taught language (not as an experiment by some always-well-meaning NIH-funded psychology professors, but by a real adoptive parent)?  Would it have the expectation, indeed the right, to go to school?

When it reached adulthood, assuming it wasn't so immunologically vulnerable that it would quickly die of some sort of infection, or malnutrition by being fed our typical diabetogenic diet, would it have the right to vote?

The real test of ethics
The real test of ethics, indeed the basic core of ethics, is when it restrains you from doing something you'd really like to do.  Otherwise, it's basically a feel-good game.  So, how seriously, no matter how many ethics seminars we may have been certified as having attended, do we take human rights?  On which side of the sadism line do our views lie?  When is it time to stop superficial speculation or even joking about all of this, even in major news and journal media, instead to take a stand and draw the line, a line that one simply may not cross?

Old News is Interesting News

We continue to comment on things related to paleontology.  This is not our field, and we've commented mainly on what we believe are premature if not insufficiently baked speculations about what evolved for what in our early history of a species, around 2 million years ago.  But there is a more recent (paleontologically) story that is of interest and is closer, at least, to what we at least know something about.

For decades there have been debates about whether or in what sense Neandertals, a kind of fossil relative of ours that existed from about 400,000 to about 40,000 years ago in Europe, and similar creatures elsewhere, co-existed with our immediate ancestors.  Neandertal-looking fossils disappeared 40,000 years ago, but more modern looking fossils seemed to have become common about that time.  The question has been whether these were different species, where and for how long they might have been cohabiting contemporaries in Europe, and whether there was any mating between them.

Not long ago a relatively complete set of Neandertal DNA sequence data was reported, that confirmed that overall Neandertals seemed to have a deeper but somewhat separate common ancestry relative to us modern humans.  But bits of the Neandertal sequence seemed too similar ours to be part of that picture.  That suggested that there was, in fact, some admixture.  In turn, that means that Neandertals and our 'modern' looking ancestors weren't separate species in the clear-cut classical sense.  But the evidence is not overwhelmingly strong and it's statistical in the sense that common ancestry times and degrees of relationship among DNA sequences have to be judged in relation to probabilistic models of deep population history.

How that apparent admixture happened is a matter of demography--population size, location, contact and mating patterns.  If there were doubts about the fact of contemporaneity of the two groups, then clearly they could not have mated, and the genetic evidence would need some re-thinking.

Now there are reports of a human-ancestral fossil from England that has been recently dated to about 40,000 years, the first or oldest known modern-looking fossil in that part of Europe.  This is touted in the media, as usual, because all stories are touted as greatly as the investigators and co-conspiring journals can manage.  Still, if it is a 'modern' ancestor--the fragmentary nature of the bits of tooth and bone make that still open to discussion, it is evidence of the potentially long (thousands of years) co-habitation of modern ancestors and doomed Neandertals in Europe.

If the evidence holds up, the evolutionary dynamic question is what extent and kinds of contact and interaction would be expected to have taken place, and whether this is consistent with the sequence data as we described above.

The story, like all such stories, gets a lot of press ink, but one thing is important to think about before we get too excited.  There are already substantial differences among modern humans from South American to Africa, peoples who have been separated for around 100,000 years.  But they are clearly not separate species.  When people from one location travel to another, as Europeans and Africans and Asians have come to North America for example, they naturally mate.  There is admixture--but not species admixture.  So, first of all, Neandertal-premodern mating would not be a shocking surprise.

Secondly, the definition of 'species' is well-known to be problematic.  We know rather clearly from the Neandertal sequence data already available, that the Neandertals were about as close to us, relative to our mutual relationship to common ancestry with our closest relatives the chimps, as we would expect from the fossil dates.  So, if Neandertal sequences were from 40,000 years ago, and Neandertals split 400,000 years from our own lineage, but we had about 8 million years of overall common ancestry, you'd expect that 400,000 years ago, when we and the Neandertals were one species, we were already 15/16ths identical to each other compared to chimps (because 400,000 is 1/16 of the way from 8,000,000 years ago to today.  We were all essentially 'human' by then.

Thus even by the most species-separating, melodramatizing advocate of 'admixture', the Neandertals and humans were essentially already the same species in terms of their overall DNA.  Whether or not we 'could', or just didn't, inter-mix.

Of course if Neandertal and our various ancestors never lived nearby, then of course no sort of direct 'admixture' between the two could have taken place.  So if the DNA suggests something like that did occur, and if the existing fossil dates, reinforced by the dating of the new British find (no tea was found at the site, by the way), at least the opportunity for mating was there.  Opportunity may be nine points in the law, and the DNA suggest at least some admixture.

Still, thinking about it, while it's very newsy, there is nothing particularly scientifically important about the question from a genetic point of view.  Yes, there could be traits found in Neandertals but not in our lineage.  Bigger brow-ridges may be an example.  But we vary among ourselves in important traits (like disease susceptibility), and clearly in many physical traits as our 'racial' variation shows.  This may have a lot to do with genetics, case by case, but it has very little to do with species or admixture.

For these reasons, despite the genocentric focus of all the news, the really interesting questions are not  genetic ones.  They are cultural ones.  What were the Neandertal and pre-modern populations like in size, behavior, environmental preferences, language, technologies, and so on?  What were their mating patterns?  When they saw each other, what kinds of relationships did the two groups have?  If there was intermating, were there recognized kinship affiliations among the adjacent villages of the two groups?  Did they share religious, body-decorating, food preparation and preference, and so on patterns?

It is these things, not genes, that could have been far more important in determining what happened.  It is true that genetic differences, even in something like body smell, could have inhibited mating.  But why do so many go so far out of their way to suggest things, than to try to find cultural explanations?

In part this is because genes mean grants, the news media eat it up, and they're the causes-du-jour of our time.  It is possible, certainly, that there were genetic barriers (even our favorite self-promoting criterion of intelligence). But then to suggest that and yet see some intermating evidence, leads to forced explanations (such as, essentially, rape of Neandertals by aggressive, superior, violent 'moderns').  That, too, is catchy and may attract media as well as professional attention.  But so far, it's not supported by any actual evidence beyond the imagination.

Again, right under our noses is the most fascinating question of all: how one human-like species completely displaced or replaced another.  The Neandertals disappeared, if they were indeed more than a 'racial' group at the time.  But before that, even more surprising if current views are close to correct, about 100,000 or fewer years ago, premoderns spread out of a spot somewhere near east Africa, and the long-established Homo erectus creatures disappeared.

It's difficult to imagine how these things happened, other than by accepting superficial, nearly evidence-free speculations.  But in any case, those questions seem more interesting, and are certainly more challenging, than always focusing on genes.