6e8a/1234549180-captaincaveman.jpgThe NYT reports that the Neanderthal gnenome has mostly been mapped and that we could bring one to life for just $30m. So, Seattle should tax SUVs, fixies, and pit bulls and give the money to some of those folks in South Lake Union to build us our own Captain Caveman.

Shit, the PI loses that in just two years, and the city was playing with the idea of taking that over. Or the stupid Viaduct tunnel idea is $1.4 billion. (If I had a calculator, I’d tell you how many times $30m goes in to $1.4. But I think you could probably build a brigade of Neanderthals!)

What would we do with them? Dress them up in funny outfits; teach them to water ski; work at liquor stores? We just build them some nice Northwest craftsman bungalows in Magnolia, give ’em a little pocket change and watch the tourism money pour in. If you were a tourist, would you rather go to a sculpture park (if I had Google on this machine I’d tell you how much we paid for that!) or be in a city where Neanderthals water ski?

We don’t want those fucks in Oklahoma to beat us on this one.

Tim Keck is the publisher of The Stranger.

45 replies on “$30m to Breed a Neanderthal? Vamos, Seattle!”

  1. “if I had Google on this machine”

    You crack me up, Mr. Keck. Unless you were serious, in which case it would still be funny, but I’d be laughing at you rather than with you.

    And to answer your question: porn. I would make lots and lots of Neanderthal pornography.

  4. As far as I’m concerned $30million is cheap to do something so significant as bringing back a neanderthal for study. It’d be a scientific gold mine. Humor aside, $30million is nothing compared to the many billions of dollars spent on the space program, and this would be the Hubble telescope of anthropology and evolutionary sciences.

  8. I think we should do it because there are a million good ideas.

    Teach them to shoot apples off each others’ head. It doesn’t matter if they’re a bad bow…thal as long as rugged protective eye wear is worn.

    Teach them to sit around and smoke Pall Malls and to say fuck you no matter what anyone says to them.

  11. Fnarf @ 6. I’m a publisher not an editor. And I’m not really all that good of a publisher. Could someone in this office fix my error? Please. Because:
    A) Editing blog posts is out of my metier.
    B) Even when pointed out I still don’t know what I did wrong.
    Thanks Fnarf!

  14. @11, you don’t need to be an editor to know what is wrong with “Shit, the PI looses that in just two” …. Hell, I’m a freakin database monkey!

  18. @16 Fnarf.
    Those links were really helpful. Particularly the mnemonic devices they offered: “Tight is to the write and lose is to the left.” and “Whiners never quit and quitters never loose.”
    Thanks again!

  19. Not to be a buzz-kill, but a Neanderthal would probably be a bit of a bruiser and a more than a bit on the slow side, but would be likely mostly indistinguishable from a modern human.

    Other than the technical challenge of cloning an extinct creature, the scientific/anthropological value of studying one outside the context of it’s original culture is likely to be limited. Not to mention the whole question of how you treat one– it’d be far to human to treat like an animal, but it would no doubt have a difficult time integrating into sapients society. You would likely end up with a super-humanly strong mentally-handicapped person.

    If you were going to try to clone an extinct species, there’s other ones I’d sooner pick. Whatever happened to the Mammoth-cloning hubub from a few years back?

  20. The single most horrible error? Yah, it’s pretty annoying, but the morons who don’t know the difference between “to,” “too” and “two” are right up there.

    Just in the last week on Slog, I’ve seen “cause celeb” and “in the throws of agony.” Obviously, Tim’s not the only one who slept through English class.

  22. How funny would it be if we discovered that humans have devolved from Neanderthals? I’m predicting some sort of Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer scenario. He would get raised from birth by scientists, goes to the best schools, and probably wouldn’t have to worry about ADHD.

  24. Morally and ethically wrong. Neanderthals were highly intelligent people. Not actually human if one strictly defines a humanity as belonging to Homo Sapiens alone, but from what we know, they had all of the attributes that make a person. They were culturally and socially advanced, made art, wrought tools, had fairly elaborate burial rituals which indicate they may even had religion. Human cloning is banned for very good reasons and should be extended to the Neanderthal.

  25. Breed them, bring back slavery, save the economy. All stimulus monies should be put into a Neanderthal slavery program at once. Free via-tunnel workers!

  26. I wouldn’t worry too much. I’m skeptical of the claim that we can easily create lifeforms just because we have their DNA map. It’s one thing to know what order the parts fit in, quite another to actually MAKE one. It isn’t cloning if you don’t have an original to make a copy of. It’s not like you can just sit down and stick them together like Lego: “A, C, A, T, T, now where did I put those Gs?”

  27. Bring one to life?

    Um.

    NO.

    Sorry, not true. Even with genetic manipulation using existing human and related chromosomes, not true at all.

    God you’re gullible. Have you been wikisurfing again?

  28. Fnarf @16:
    I never knew that “grocer’s apostrophe” till now (though I’m certainly familiar with the error..)
    Here’s a question, is it OK to use apostrophe for plural forms for some of these new all-caps words, acronyms, etc.?
    For ex: CD’s vs CDs

  29. I say we make up a whole bunch of Neaderthals, give ’em guns, and turn them loose [correct usage] in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That would be fun.

    We could even make a movie about it, sorta like AVP. Coolness.

  30. Fnarf:

    With viruses, a few labs have done just that: re-assembled the organism one DNA base pair at a time.

    DNA oligo synthesis is much more efficient than it used to be.

    With that said, I’m also pretty dubious. Even with the human genome, we haven’t been able to sequence deep into the sub-telomeric or sub-centromeric regions of the chromosomes. Too many repeats and other difficult DNA.

  31. @28, there are two schools of thought on that. One is that no, it’s not acceptable. The second is that, since English is a living language, and since the majority of people using English right now do it that way, sure, why not?$

    Take your pick (but I don’t use the apostrophes).

  32. @28: no. You have a collection of CDs, you were born in the 70s, those Cadillac XLRs are piling up on the lot.

    Jonathan, I’m no expert, but aren’t homos (neanderthalensisistically speaking) a tad more complex than viruses? Has ANYTHING in the animal kingdom been created from scratch?

  34. Oh, absolutely Fnarf. Hence, why it would cost (at least) $30 million–just to try something that would be a real technical stretch.

    The closest example I can think of is the few Japanese research labs that created artificial human chromosomes, starting with a chopped-down human chromosome 21.

    There is a really interesting experiment in here–one that is also horribly unethical:

    If you swapped just the protein-coding sequences of the neanderthal (a teeny percentage of the total DNA sequence in the genome) into the equivalent human protein-coding loci, what would you get?

    In other words, what makes a human, a human? The protein coding sequence or all the ‘junk’ DNA?

    My guess is you’d get an ugly looking human. In other words, what makes humans different from Neanderthals (or chimps, or even mice) isn’t our proteins, but how our DNA is ordered, packaged and regulated. The proteins haven’t changed much in evolution. Their organization and patterns of gene expression are quite a bit different…

  37. 1) @20: no, they’re, their, there is bad; your, you’re is the worst.

    2) Have none of you seen Jurrasic Park!?

    3) Captain Caveman is not a Neanderthal. He’s a pre-historic Homo Sapeins.

  39. Comte is right; Oklahomans have recreated Homo Neanderthalensis without any kind of technology at all, just good old fashioned selective breeding. With their sisters.

  40. @34 – amusingly, there are more chromosomes than you think – we don’t stop counting at 24.

    And don’t get me started about stop codons or siRNA …

  41. OK.

    This was funny the first time.

    But I’m sick and tired of the Geico commercials and now you want to clone us to be your servants?

    Have a heart!

    Thanks.

  42. Explain to me Will how there are more than 24 human chromsomes. Please. I count twenty-two paired, the X and the Y. Maybe you’re counting the mitochondrial genome?

    My head hurts.

  43. Well, gee, Jonathan, you said yourself there’s 22 pairs, so that’s 44, plus the two sexy ones, and if you’ve got ten people, that’s 460, right? No, wait — there’s like ten trillion cells in the human body, and there’s chromosomes in EVERY ONE OF THEM! Oh my god, that’s 460 trillion, no — 460 quadrillion chromosomes right there in the coffee shop! OMG!

  45. @31 & 32:
    re: CDs vs CD’s,
    I ask because i’d been curious about it and, after searching online, determined that it seems to be used both ways. I needed to make a decision for something I was writing for my job, explained it to my boss (not a native speaker of English), and at first decided that there was no reason to use the apostrophe. After we thought it over, though, we decided it actually might be less confusing to use the apostrophe, considering that with all the new abbreviations and acronyms now mixing upper- and lower-case letters it might appear to be some new format. i.e. CDs as a new cee-dee-ess format, for ex.
    Still not completely sure which is better, though..

    btw, Fnarf, when you wrote:
    @28: no. You have a collection of CDs, you were born in the 70s, those Cadillac XLRs are piling up on the lot.

    Jonathan, I’m no expert, …

    I at first said to myself, “How the fuck did he figure out my real name from my initials?” Of course, the second part of your post was directed to Jonathan Golob, though…

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