Should we Clone Neanderthals?

Raising Neanderthals

In northern Spain 49,000 years ago, 11 Neanderthals were murdered. Their tooth enamel shows that each of them had gone through several periods of severe starvation, a condition their assailants probably shared. Cut marks on the bones indicate the people were butchered with stone tools. About 700 feet inside El Sidrön cave, a research team including Lalueza-Fox excavated 1,700 bones from that cannibalistic feast. Much of what is known about Neanderthal genetics comes from those 11 individuals.

Lalueza-Fox does not plan to sequence the entire genome of the El Sidrön Neanderthals. He is interested in specific genes. “I choose genes that are somehow related to individuality,” he says. “I’d like to create a personal image of these guys.”

Extract from: Should we Clone Neanderthals?

Genetics has reduced the organic world to the status of a code. In a gesture that continues the work of Descartes, mankind has separated itself from its own constitution. The mind, or perhaps the self, is merely anchored to the body, rather than reliant on it. Since Descartes we have been able to refer to the organic body as other, and we continue to congratulate ourselves.

Genetic sequencing instigates a new kind of dualism. That of body and code. The reduction of living matter to four strands of nucleic acid; the code constitutes the life, yet it is not the life. On the computer screen, or in a sequencing lab, the code floats free from the living, becoming pure information in and of itself. We are now able to refer to the information of the human as other and again we congratulate ourselves.

From Descartes onwards, through Kant and the enlightenment, philosophy now finds itself at an impasse. By separating the mind and the body dualism also separated the tools of enquiry by which the holistic ‘human’ could be understood. Man is not of world, man is not even of body: and so it transpires that man is not even of the sequence; the code; the malleable constituent of life itself.

This new dualism opens itself through the rhetoric of genetics. Science is now capable of handling the entire history of life as if it were a cut-up text; a freakish maelstrom of free-floating base-pairs mangled in some Burroughs-esque sequencing shredder. To science the sequence maketh the Neanderthal, but it does not constitute mankind.

But what of the historicity of those creatures? For Neanderthal are much more than a genetic cousin, labelled in similitude. The Neanderthal is a symbol; a mythic resonance. Neanderthals are a different category of person, literally lost to the world, but not lost to our memory. In being so close in kind to us they represent the ultimate other. As much creature as human; as much removed as they are imminent.

Do we give them the gift of life by re-sequencing their code? By ushering them into our time through test-tubes and computer simulations? Forgetting for a moment the religious efficacy entailed by this position (by my use of the word ‘gift’), the moral implications alone out number the minds available to ponder them. And still not a single metaphysical question is raised.

What is it exactly that we think we are cloning? I write more on this over at 3quarksdaily…

  • “Genetic sequencing instigates a new kind of dualism…”

    I don’t think it does. I think genetics, much like complexity science, actually demands a movement away from dualism, and binaryism, while retaining what is useful about dialectical thinking.

    I believe, if anything, it offers a way for us to think complexity is a very important post-digital, post-analog, and imaginative way. Imagining the existence of actual flesh ‘codes’, with their organic dynamics and relations, allows us to think about real living assemblages (in the Deleuze/Latour/DeLanda sense) – and how the world ‘hangs together’ in a utterly intimate way.

    I think by opposing code-thinking and non-code thinking we actually reproduce the binary, and implicitly validate the illusory Cartesian ontology, and ultimately fall prey to a kind of romantic actualism you seem to want to critique.

    It is the dominating computer trope that needs to be rejected, and not any practical or imaginative acknowledgement of actual ‘codes’ or embodiments as they exist both ‘out there’ and ‘in here’…

    All the best,

    m-

  • “Genetic sequencing instigates a new kind of dualism…”

    I don’t think it does. I think genetics, much like complexity science, actually demands a movement away from dualism, and binaryism, while retaining what is useful about dialectical thinking.

    I believe, if anything, it offers a way for us to think complexity is a very important post-digital, post-analog, and imaginative way. Imagining the existence of actual flesh ‘codes’, with their organic dynamics and relations, allows us to think about real living assemblages (in the Deleuze/Latour/DeLanda sense) – and how the world ‘hangs together’ in a utterly intimate way.

    I think by opposing code-thinking and non-code thinking we actually reproduce the binary, and implicitly validate the illusory Cartesian ontology, and ultimately fall prey to a kind of romantic actualism you seem to want to critique.

    It is the dominating computer trope that needs to be rejected, and not any practical or imaginative acknowledgement of actual ‘codes’ or embodiments as they exist both ‘out there’ and ‘in here’…

    All the best,

    m-

  • uuu

  • “Genetic sequencing instigates a new kind of dualism…”

    I don’t think it does. I think genetics, much like complexity science, actually demands a movement away from dualism, and binaryism, while retaining what is useful about dialectical thinking.

    I believe, if anything, it offers a way for us to think complexity is a very important post-digital, post-analog, and imaginative way. Imagining the existence of actual flesh ‘codes’, with their organic dynamics and relations, allows us to think about real living assemblages (in the Deleuze/Latour/DeLanda sense) – and how the world ‘hangs together’ in a utterly intimate way.

    I think by opposing code-thinking and non-code thinking we actually reproduce the binary, and implicitly validate the illusory Cartesian ontology, and ultimately fall prey to a kind of romantic actualism you seem to want to critique.

    It is the dominating computer trope that needs to be rejected, and not any practical or imaginative acknowledgement of actual ‘codes’ or embodiments as they exist both ‘out there’ and ‘in here’…

    All the best,

    m-

  • Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

    I am interested in the paradigm of genetics at the moment, dominated as it is by a computer based coding rhetoric. I think that, quite practically, the importance of DNA, RNA or the 'junk' material that fills our cells is not yet understood properly. On a more metaphysical level, and perhaps with thinkers like Deleuze and DeLanda in mind, I worry that 'code' has been mistaken for 'materiality'. I am a thoroughly red-blooded materialist, but as DeLanda acknowledges in his book 'A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History':

    “While the concept of self-organisation, as applied to purely material and energetic systems, has been sharpened considerably over the last three decades, it still needs to be refined before we can apply it to the case of human societies. Specifically, we need to take into account that any explanation of human behaviour must involve reference to irreducible intentional entities such as 'beliefs' and 'desires', since these expectations and preferences are what guide human decision making in a wide range of social activities.”

    Of course 'genetic material' does not adhere to this concern, being a non-social material, but I think that 'genetic code' does and is, being a paradigm constructed from within a social, technical and scientific consensus rooted in the past 50/60 years of human knowledge (furthermore rooted by beliefs and desires). It will change, just as our belief that there was an aether changed over time to the modern consensus that waves travel through space-time itself.

    I totally stand by your comments, and it's great to see three names bunched together (Deleuze/Latour/DeLanda) whose work influences my own (where does Serres fit in?). I suppose I need to think this one through a bit more. Did you read my 3quarks expansion of this brief blog-post?

  • Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

    I am interested in the paradigm of genetics at the moment, dominated as it is by a computer based coding rhetoric. I think that, quite practically, the importance of DNA, RNA or the 'junk' material that fills our cells is not yet understood properly. On a more metaphysical level, and perhaps with thinkers like Deleuze and DeLanda in mind, I worry that 'code' has been mistaken for 'materiality'. I am a thoroughly red-blooded materialist, but as DeLanda acknowledges in his book 'A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History':

    “While the concept of self-organisation, as applied to purely material and energetic systems, has been sharpened considerably over the last three decades, it still needs to be refined before we can apply it to the case of human societies. Specifically, we need to take into account that any explanation of human behaviour must involve reference to irreducible intentional entities such as 'beliefs' and 'desires', since these expectations and preferences are what guide human decision making in a wide range of social activities.”

    Of course 'genetic material' does not adhere to this concern, being a non-social material, but I think that 'genetic code' does and is, being a paradigm constructed from within a social, technical and scientific consensus rooted in the past 50/60 years of human knowledge (furthermore rooted by beliefs and desires). It will change, just as our belief that there was an aether changed over time to the modern consensus that waves travel through space-time itself.

    I totally stand by your comments, and it's great to see three names bunched together (Deleuze/Latour/DeLanda) whose work influences my own (where does Serres fit in?). I suppose I need to think this one through a bit more. Did you read my 3quarks expansion of this brief blog-post?