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[Dunamisdeos]

I used to go to a houkah bar where the waiter dude would tell stories, and one of them was when he beat up his friend because he thought he was a rude sheep.

Now that I think about it, he actually had a lot of stories about things he mistook for sheep, and sheep he didn't care for at that.

[scriver]

He was a secret Guardian against the Dread Sheeple

[Tack]

Nobody is gonna stop getting high in a burned out building. Maybe it was camouflage.
Also, TIL about octopus being riddled with cancer. We’ll have to see what happens if we end up curing it in humans. Could end up making a client species which would be neat and totally ethical.

Double-also, I don’t like our indigenous eating dugongs and that’s a whole other story because it isn’t their only form of sustenance, it’s just a traditional food. Eating whales because you grew up in whalesberg where nothing grows is at least more understandable.

[Egan_BW]

Adding a few extra species to our civilization would be the best thing since sharp rocks.

[wierd]

To be perfectly honest, I would totally support an actually serious project to clone neanderthals.  All current data suggests they were every bit as intelligent as their cromagnon counterparts, and thus, as intelligent as modern humans.  They just had a very different set of body plan evolutionary patterns printed on them. (Robustiform, etc.)

To me it makes no sense to preach the virtues of diversity, while pretending it would be unethical to return an extinct species of intelligent life. It smacks too heavily of "Interracial kids are a travesty, because society wont accept them!" of yester-year to me. 

But that's just my opinion.  Sadly, there is simply not enough fully sequenced neanderthal genomes to even attempt such a project.  IIRC, less than a dozen have been processed, and you need closer to 500 to even consider producing a viable reproductive community.  This is greatly hampered by both a lack of quality remains, and a lack of funding for either basic anthropology projects to find them, as well as the systemic bigotry found in the ethics discussions about such a thing.

What I am trying to say is, if sufficient genotype data was available, I would have no problems with, and would even contribute money toward, a reputable effort to restore that species.

[Egan_BW]

Still basically humans. It would be neat to do, but wouldn't introduce nearly as much value as bringing non-mammals into the fold.

[Rolan7]

But phrenology! /s

Still basically humans. It would be neat to do, but wouldn't introduce nearly as much value as bringing non-mammals into the fold.

Non-mammal insight would be amazing, but we're nowhere near able to uplift nonmammals.  We can't even uplift our machines, yet!

Neanderthals were arguably *there*.  I don't know if they'd be useful as thinkers, but surely their perspective would be fascinating.  If we could do a Jurassic Park on them, it would give us a lot of insight into the origin and branching of the human brain.

[Kagus]

Just ask Ron Perlman to help sequence the Neanderthal DNA.

As for octopuses, don't they have a fairly short memory? They're smart enough to learn new things quite quickly, but you'll have to keep showing them how to do it each day (much like some of the people I've worked with...). Crows are definitely the future.

In other WTFs, we've apparently entered Bizarro world, where China accuses Sweden of violating human rights.

[wierd]

Again, the problem is that of a combination of things.

1) you need at LEAST 500 unrelated individuals of a species to have even a hope of a viable gene pool (see also, "why are cheetahs endangered?") Over 1000 for a reasonably good chance at long term survival.

2) Neanderthal skeletons are old. Very old.  The DNA in those skeletons is contaminated with fungi, bacteria, and is degraded terribly.  It takes a great deal of effort to sequence a single genotype from a quality specimen. A good deal of that is spent laboriously piecing together the fragments of the broken down DNA from the sample, and ensuring that it is not contaminated by any of the prior contaminants, nor with human lab technician DNA.  This is a very difficult and currently still very costly process. (but the cost IS going down!)

3) There are only so many places where neanderthals are known to have had persistent range of habitation, and where remains are likely to have been preserved. This makes finding the remains difficult to begin with.

4) There is a general lack of funding for general sciences, of which field biology of extinct species like neanderthal is one.  This means that even if remains were more plentiful, there would be great difficulty procuring sufficient numbers of quality remains to sequence.

5) There is a strong "Dont play god!!" and "Think about the HUMAN babies before you go making copies of extinct non-humans!" demographic that would be **VERY** vocal against such a project, (because they are fucking idiots and bigots besides)

All of which would actively thwart any such project.  Throwing a single very gifted or skilled scientist at the problem wont fix any of the above.  About the only tractible one would be the funding one.  I think we can all agree how fruitless a campaign to increase science spending would be, because of how terrible special interests are in politics, and the low ROI of academia in general. (EG, we have too many economists in govt, and not enough philosophy or science grads- which is a pretty good reason why we have the kinds of social disorders we have today.  EVERY FUCKING THING boils down to "Will it make *insert here* fucking fabulously rich?" with the answer to that question being what drives whether a project will get funding or not.)

Still, I am with Rolan about the clear benefits of cloning neanderthal.  The difference of opinion they would bring to the table, because of their differently wired (but equally valid) neurology would be very valuable to us as a species.  To me, that alone would justify their resurrection, but many, MANY people would disagree.

[KittyTac]

To me, at least, scientific knowledge matters the most. So I'm for cloning Neanderthals.

[Greiger]

Would probably help us make the step to viable human cloning as I understand they were very similar to us, and also I the insight into the human brain's development would have it's uses too. 

But yea there are a million things keeping any of that stuff from realistically happening.  I don't think "god" would have given us the tools to play god, or the tools to discover how creation actually works if they didn't want us to, but yea I figure reason #5 is going to be a particularly strong sticking point.   ...Ironically even if a godlike being came down from on high and gave us everything we needed to clone a neanderthal.

[pisskop]

Im a big fan of the idea that god is 5th dimension cthulu, and can be likened to child with a bitch'n chemistry set.

He himself may not understand or particularly care about the fineries of life or the exact interactions his little organics do.  And we may not even be the main attraction in his universe.  How rude of us to think we are the center of the universe he made.  Instead of the fuckoff huge explosions, the rare chemistry, blackholes, science to the magnitude we dont understand yet, and the Squidmen Empire from AlienSystem5.

[Teneb]

Something strange is going on whenever I click the "new" button on threads. It actually loads the page several posts after the first unread post for me.

Im a big fan of the idea that god is 5th dimension cthulu, and can be likened to child with a bitch'n chemistry set.

He himself may not understand or particularly care about the fineries of life or the exact interactions his little organics do.  And we may not even be the main attraction in his universe.  How rude of us to think we are the center of the universe he made.  Instead of the fuckoff huge explosions, the rare chemistry, blackholes, science to the magnitude we dont understand yet, and the Squidmen Empire from AlienSystem5.

Nonsense, the main attraction are the Space Dinosaurs of AlienSystem3.

[Kagus]

Something strange is going on whenever I click the "new" button on threads. It actually loads the page several posts after the first unread post for me.

Oh good, so it's not just me then...

[KittyTac]

Im a big fan of the idea that god is 5th dimension cthulu, and can be likened to child with a bitch'n chemistry set.

He himself may not understand or particularly care about the fineries of life or the exact interactions his little organics do.  And we may not even be the main attraction in his universe.  How rude of us to think we are the center of the universe he made.  Instead of the fuckoff huge explosions, the rare chemistry, blackholes, science to the magnitude we dont understand yet, and the Squidmen Empire from AlienSystem5.

This. Some random hairless monkeys living in a bog-standard galaxy around a pretty boring star on a probably-common type of planet won't interest any potential creator our universe may have.