Question for the lawyers
Mar. 14th, 2014 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicollA Neanderthal steps through from another history; due to various events he strikes and kills someone here.
Can he be arrested for murder? Does a Neanderthal automatically count as a human in the eyes of the law? If so, how far from homo sapiens sapiens does a hominid have to be before they don't count as a person by default?
Can he be arrested for murder? Does a Neanderthal automatically count as a human in the eyes of the law? If so, how far from homo sapiens sapiens does a hominid have to be before they don't count as a person by default?
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Date: 2014-03-14 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-14 05:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-14 05:38 pm (UTC)[1] About the chromosomes: I'm not questioning your statement on it being tried.
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Date: 2014-03-14 05:49 pm (UTC)USENET is right over there ->
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Date: 2014-03-16 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-14 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-14 06:26 pm (UTC)It's interesting to ask how interfertile neanderthals and humans were. As I understand it, the genetic evidence seems to show selection against some swaths of the neanderthal genome, possibly indicating fertility problems when crossing with H. sapiens.
As for human/ape hybrids. This reminds me of an old joke.
A scientist puts an want ad in the paper (this is an old joke, remember): "Man wanted for human/ape crossbreeding experiment. $5,000."
He soon gets a call from a subject. "I'll participate in your experiment on two conditions."
"First, my identity must forever be kept entirely secret."
"And second... can I pay the $5,000 in installments?"
Not entirely a joke
Date: 2014-03-14 06:56 pm (UTC)http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/yo1-v14n10
Re: Not entirely a joke
Date: 2014-03-14 08:03 pm (UTC)I'm going to the special hell
Date: 2014-03-14 11:48 pm (UTC)Re: Not entirely a joke
Date: 2014-03-14 10:19 pm (UTC)Re: Not entirely a joke
Date: 2014-03-14 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-15 12:48 pm (UTC)The evidence is that interfertility was very low, with fertile crosses happening less than once per generation over the whole population. In particular, male neandertal/sapiens hybrids were probably all sterile, which is a common pattern for species that have almost but not quite completely speciated.
My own personal theory: We know that as closely-related species begin to speciate, there's selection pressure to reduce inter-species hybridization (because hybrids are less fit than either pure species). Eventually there are physical and genetic incompatibilities that make hybridization impossible, but earlier there are often behavioral factors that make interspecies breeding less likely. Bird songs, for example, or specific mating behaviors.
We also know about "the uncanny valley", the phenomenon in which things (like robots or animations) that are nearly but not quite human suddenly become creepy and horrifying.
My theory is that the uncanny valley is the leftover behavioral adaptation that prevent H. sapiens from frequently interbreeding with Neanderthals, Denisovians, and whatever the mysterious third Homo species was that was recently detected genetically. (Obviously this would not be 100% effective; Darwin spent a third of his book talking about variation within species.)
If so, then our reaction to the sight of a walking, talking Neanderthal would be instant revulsion and horror, which wouldn't bode well for her fair and balanced trial.
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Date: 2014-03-15 03:59 am (UTC)Of course, professional ethics aside, who'd want to write that paper? You'd be The Chimp Guy the rest of your career...
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Date: 2014-03-15 04:05 am (UTC)It was in 1920s Russia. At that time it was still thought that humans had 48 chromosomes.
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Date: 2014-03-14 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-15 02:10 am (UTC)runs some risk of keeping one out of trouble for awhile.
There's absolutely no reason to believe that a population of modern humans is any smarter than a population of Neanderthals. (Some habits about that, but not well supported by the modern science. Differently social and possibly not as talkative, yes.) There's not much expectation that a Neanderthal individual in current clothes would obviously stand out in a cosmopolitan modern population, either.
Humans did not emerge from Africa once. The ~60,000 years BP migration was at least the third and it met, as the second had, archaic human populations that had diverged a bit, interbred with those archaic populations -- at least three that we can find in the genes -- that hadn't diverged too far. (No evidence of interbreeding with hobbits on Flores, and indeed the branch point for that population is *way* back there.)
Why is it only 3%? Well, 3% of the ~billion people in Europe and the ~billion people in China is sixty million people, probably more than there ever were of back 50 kyears BP. Cold adaptation's expensive. Subsequent agricultural and city selection and population density selection didn't leave all that much uniquely Neanderthal floating around in the modern population.
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Date: 2014-03-15 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-15 12:52 pm (UTC)Yes, I did read that wrong; thanks for the clarification.
I'd be vaguely hopeful; the trend since we knew what genes were has been to be more inclusive. Got a long way to go, but it does generally seem to be going the right way.