{"id":4090,"date":"2010-05-07T13:01:15","date_gmt":"2010-05-07T21:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=4090"},"modified":"2010-05-07T13:01:15","modified_gmt":"2010-05-07T21:01:15","slug":"the-wives-of-cain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/the-wives-of-cain\/","title":{"rendered":"The wives of Cain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Discover<\/a> I’ve been talking a lot about the new Neandertal admixture<\/a> paper. The short of it is that it looks like most of the world’s population has admixture from Neandertals on the interval 0-5% (though some scholars, such as John Hawks<\/a>, believe there are methodological reasons why this is an underestimate).<\/p>\n

This post isn’t about science though. Rather, it’s about religion, and this weblog is a place where I can talk about that with more justification than at Discover<\/i>. What does this imply for reconciliation or interpretation of ensoulment and the origin of a humanity in a religious context?<\/b> Mormons believe that different sentient organisms have their own gods, so did the Neandertals have their own god? Some Catholic theologians have resolved the idea of Adam and the Fall by contending that Adam and Eve were the first human-like creatures who had souls. Did Neandertals have souls? Did Lucy have a soul? <\/p>\n

The implications aren’t only religious. In Science<\/i> there are some articles on the paper and one of them talked to scientists and ethicists about cloning a Neandertal, and one of the major bioethical issues that cropped up is that Neandertals are human, so you can’t clone them willy-nilly. Additionally, one individual noted that it would be cruel to bring a Neandertal into the world, when you don’t know how they’d fit in and function in a modern society. The same logic could of course be applied to many pure and partly Neandertal human fetuses who are brought into the world. Interesting times….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Discover I’ve been talking a lot about the new Neandertal admixture paper. The short of it is that it looks like most of the world’s population has admixture from Neandertals on the interval 0-5% (though some scholars, such … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[533],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4090"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4090"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4091,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4090\/revisions\/4091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}