Diversity über alles: Harvard scientist proposes creating an entire race of Neanderthals

Alex B. writes:

Declaring that he is ready and able to clone Neanderthals, George Church, a genetics professor at Harvard School of Medicine, tells his true motivation and main goal:

“They could even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity.”

Cloning human beings is unacceptable to liberals, unless it helps create another protected minority that will become a political force and vote as a block. If they will do this, there is nothing liberals won’t do.

Here is the story, from The Telegraph:

‘I can create Neanderthal baby, I just need willing woman’
A scientist has said it would be possible to clone a Neanderthal baby from ancient DNA if he could find a woman willing to act as a surrogate.

The process would not be legal in many countries and would involve using DNA extracted from fossils.

George Church, a genetics professor of Harvard School of Medicine, said that the process was possible and that far from being brutal and primitive, Neanderthals were intelligent beings.

They are believed to be one of the ancestors of modern man and became extinct 33,000 years ago. He added that altering the human genome could also provide the answers to curing diseases such as cancer and HIV, and hold the key to living to 120.

He told Der Spiegel, the German magazine: “I have already managed to attract enough DNA from fossil bones to reconstruct the DNA of the human species largely extinct. Now I need an adventurous female human.”

The professor claims that he could introduce parts of the Neanderthal genome to human stem cells and clone them to create a foetus that could then be implanted in a woman.

Prof Church helped start the Human Genome Project that mapped human DNA and is well respected in the field. His comments will surprise most geneticists who believe that cloning humans is unacceptable. It is illegal in Britain.

Prof Church said: “We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it’s very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn’t we be able to do so?”

He added: “Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us.

“When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it’s conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial. They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity.”

Prof Church said the technique would involve artificially creating DNA from fossilised material and introducing this into human stem cell lines.

He discusses his idea in his latest book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves.

He rules out recreating older human ancestors or dinosaurs, as was the subject of the Jurassic Park films, because the age limit of useful DNA is about one million years, he said.

He told the magazine: “One of the things to do is to engineer our cells so that they have a lower probability of cancer.

“And then once we have a lower probability of cancer, you can crank up their self-renewal properties, so that they have a lower probability of senescence [ageing].”

[end of article]

LA writes:

I doubt Prof. Church will have any difficulty finding a woman willing to serve as surrogate mother to the first cloned Neanderthal baby. Consider the number of white women in the contemporary world who, for the sake of liberal fashion, are eager to bear a child with a black man and thus create another Obama. How much more fashionable would it be to give birth to a Neanderthal child! Such a woman could trump all her liberal sisters.

LA continues:

Another thought. H.G. Wells, the apostle of scientific progressivism, proposed that the human race be guided and governed by a committee of scientists. If Wells, who died in 1946, had somehow heard of Church’s plan, he would have said in horror, “That is not what I meant, not what I meant at all.” For one thing, Wells believed in a Single, Rationally Led, Politically Unified Humanity. The notion of diversity pursued as an end in itself would have horrified him. He was an old Leftist. George Church is a new Leftist.

- end of initial entry -

Paul K. writes:

What if it turns out that Neanderthal-Americans vote overwhelmingly Republican—will the Harvard professor retain his enthusiasm for cloning them?

Alex B. replies:

The real buzzkill will be if Neanderthal-Americans demonstrate a significantly lower propensity to violence and higher average IQ and social achievement than a certain other diverse group. The comparison would be unbearable.

LA replies:

If that turned out to be the case, then the Neanderthals would instantly cease being touted as a “diverse” group and be seen as part of the White Power. After all, weren’t the Neanderthals the first Europeans?

January 21

Jim Kalb writes:

As always, the question arises why ever more radical diversity is so unquestionably wonderful. One possibility: diversity makes it much easier for a coherent group of smart people who know what they want to run things. Low diversity introduces the specter of racist populism, a world run by stupid uneducated prejudiced crackers who have the force and mindless self-confidence to do the sort of thing people like that want to do instead of what Harvard scientists want them to do. What could possibly be worse?

Sage McLaughlin writes:

Imagine the unblinking, ideologically-induced idiocy required to make the claim that, “The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity.” [emphasis mine.]

So, not only is diversity the highest good which any society can attain, it is the only good. Lack of diversity is the one thing we can all agree must be avoided at whatever cost, even if the cost includes the deliberate manufacture of a non-Homo sapiens species to cover whatever gap is left by mass immigration. This is contemporary liberalism in its purest, most succinct expression. There are no standards around which we may order ourselves, except diversity. That is to say, there is no reason for our society’s existence except to work towards its own extinction. To make ourselves disappear is the only goal to which any of our efforts or institutions should be oriented.

Quite simply, the comment I excerpted is one of the sickest ideas I’ve ever seen expressed out loud. Of course, it might be mitigated somewhat if we interpret him to have spoken sloppily, and that he means only that the worst thing for society is low diversity, but in the end it comes to much the same thing: Manufacturing living human beings to serve empty-headed political imperatives of contemporary “scientific” elites. This is C.S. Lewis’s abolition of man poured straight up.

I see no possible way this society escapes God’s wrath. We will be annihilated by our sin. We are running directly into the shadow cast by our turning away from him.

Alex B. writes:

“The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity.” George Church’s statement is truly profound in its consequences. It implies that as long as society has high diversity, or is working toward achieving it, nothing else matters. There can be rampant crime, terrorism, antagonism between all groups composing the society, chaos, destruction, and suffering—but if these are merely side effects of having high diversity, they don’t matter because the white liberals who unleashed all this on society have achieved their nirvana of atonement.

It also implies that the attainment of high diversity justifies any means. Those who would propose fabricating non-humans in the lab to outvote whites will not stop at anything. Leftist radicals have never stopped at mass repressions and mass murder.

Whether diversity is indeed the liberals’ main goal, or simply the most effective means of reaching their true goal,—destruction of the hated white Western society—it is undoubtedly a fail-proof means of achieving this outcome.

Daniel S. writes:

George Church’s comments about diversity reminded me of those made some years ago by General George Casey after the Fort Hood jihad attack. For the modern liberal, diversity has become a totalitarian ideology in which any steps must be taken to assure its manifestation and ascendancy. It matters not that the push for diversity leads to weird, amoral science fiction-style cloning experiments or worse yet, numerous people being murdered by terrorists. All that matters is that diversity prevails.

Robert B. writes:

I have to agree with Mr. Kalb on this one. The elite of the Left are educated people. They certainly know enough about history to know that without Europe, its peoples and their culture, the world would be very backward. The Left, therefore, know that European civilization, cut off from the rest of the world for nearly 1,000 years due to Islam’s control of the Mediterranean Sea, developed the world’s most advanced civilization without any diversity whatsoever. That civilization, homogenous and complete within itself, then went on to conquer most of the world and spread its culture and religion throughout the world. In its homelands, the civilization continued to advance at a breathtaking rate—easily and completely dwarfing the rest of the world’s “accomplishments.” The Left believe that all men and women are exactly the same, none is any different or any better than any other. Therefore, if you want to take it down, you must infiltrate it with other, dysfunctional peoples and their cultures. In so doing, the focus shifts from the old, highly successful culture, to the new, dysfunctional cultures. Dealing with the dysfunction requires that all available resources be consumed on their behalf.

Alex B. writes:

Drudge has now picked up on the story but the Daily Mail article he links makes no mention of the scientist’s diversity motivation. In fact, it cites the paragraph from The Telegraph story in which he talks about his diversity goal but cuts the citation immediately before that goal is mentioned.

Jake F. writes:

Regarding Neanderthal cloning, Professor Church said, “The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity.”

Biologists and geneticists believe that assertion to be true genetically because, among other things, diversity allows a greater range of expression of various traits, which provides a broader base for selection of good traits.

Yet so many Darwinists and liberals seem to think that diversity isn’t good in ideas. Then they get stuck with a limited number of ideas to choose from, and follow foolish ones to their end (carbon restriction treaties, cap-and-trade, single-payer healthcare, etc.) with no clue that they could be more effective (or, heaven forbid, proved wrong!) if they listened to alternative viewpoints.

LA replies:

That’s not a contradiction. To be “good,” diversity must first pass the test of liberalism. Liberalism is of course a higher value than useful Darwinian selection.

Ben S. writes:

Objections aside, I have little reason yet to believe that Prof. Church’s claim is more than braggadocio. After all, if he can derive Neanderthals from modern man, he can derive wooly mammoths from elephants, since there are much better DNA samples available from mammoths than from Neanderthals, and the regulatory obstacles would be far less. Either the technology is not there yet, or Prof. Church is more interested in publicity than in science.

LA replies:

It doesn’t matter whether Church thinks the cloning of Neanderthals can really be done. His statement expresses what he would like to do, if he could do it, and includes one of the the most extreme statements of liberalism any of us have ever seen: “The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity.” Meaning that diversity is the only good for society.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 20, 2013 09:41 PM | Send