Three Wise Men: Scientists Plan to Rebuild Neanderthal Genome

The TWM posted this in reference to this article, but I am more concerned with what the TWM themselves have to say. I focus on them not because I value their opinion on the matter but because it is a good indication of what the modern, liberal, naturalistic, evolutionist thinks about the issue.

Here is what Nat-Wu, who has at least some undergraduate education in anthropology, says:

To completely and fully understand the difference between Humans and neanderthals (or to use a more scientific and neutral terminology, Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis), we need both [genomes], especially to find out if any interbreeding ever occurred. But this analysis alone should tell us a good bit about exactly how similar neanderthals were to sapiens. There are several important questions we don't have the answers to yet, like their brain size and whether they were capable of speech yet. Actually, we know next to nothing about their cognitive abilities, although we think that they had similar sensory capabilities to ours. They did have bigger noses, mouths, and eyes, so it's possible they had more brainpower dedicated to those areas. However, their material culture remained at a primitive state for their entire existence, whereas sapiens quickly surpassed them in technological advancement. But their brain case was actually larger, so it's all up in the air.

Theoretically, at some day in the future, a complete DNA reconstruction would enable us to create a cloned neanderthal so that we could get these answers definitively. That's a moral and ethical nightmare, so I'm not even going to think about that. As to what we hope to learn from just the sequencing alone, finding out whether they had language is the big one.

Even a cursory read of Lubenow's Bones of Contention, especially the second edition which focuses much more intensely on H. neanderthalensis, points out the excessive bias, misinformation, dishonesty, and false claims that most of Nat-Wu's statment is based on. The evidence at hand does nothing to discredit the full humanity of the Neanderthals. There exists no evidence to indicate that their culture and lifestyle were anything less than fully human. As for speech, they surely had it. Skeletal anatomy indicates that they should have the same ability as anyone else. Nothing except racism and seething bias, all stemming from a desperate attempt to hold on to the "Out of Africa" theory of human evolution, would convince someone otherwise. I direct you to Lubenow's book for thorough, positive, and abundant evidence of Neanderthals' full humanity. He effectively calls into question anyone who interprets the available evidence as indicating that Neanderthal is an inferior separate species. Lubenow isn't so pretentious as to claim that he can conclusively prove anything about the past (unlike evolutionists), after all the past inevitably involves speculation. But he shows beyond the shadow of any doubt that the evidence at hand favors the full humanity of Neanderthals rather than their exclusion as some separate and illegitimate sub-species.

In fact, the Sima de los Huesos Cave material from Spain showed so conclusively that no legitimate distinction exists between the Eurpoean H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens fossils that even evolutionists had to abandon the idea and they subsequently reclassified the European hominid fossil material. The only "Neanderthals" that remain are from other continents. Of course, even there the distinctions are false but they still maintain the notion while they can.

Even more signifant to this article is the aspect of DNA comparisons. Neanderthal mtDNA has already been studied to a degree. Even though evolutionists loudly claim that they have proven that Neanderthals are a different species than modern man through this method, their claims have no ground on which to stand. Did you know that when they compared Neanderthal mtDNA to modern DNA that they excluded all samples that were "too closely similar"? Why? Because they considered it contamination of the sample. Now how could they know what was contamination and what wasn't? They obviously can't know that, so they threw out the data that supported the notion that Neanderthal was fully human and kept the data that supported the notion that Neandethal was not human. There you have it! They "proved" that Neanderthal is different by the super-scientific method of throwing out the data that doesn't fit.

Of course, this discussion is about nuclear DNA and the mapping of the entire genome. There are some serious problems here. First, if you read my previous post on Denton's research, you will know that DNA comparisons, which are heavily dependent upon the "gene-centric view of life" are hopelessly irrelevant. If that wasn't enough, we encouter the fact that the "Neanderthal" genome has suffered excessive decay given its age. There is absolutely no way to show that the samples are complete, inerrant, or uncontaminated. Third, they are obviously going to throw out every sample that looks like modern man, so we may as well let them blindfold us and tell us that 2 + 2 = 7,453.

"Science", and by that I mean the modern philosophical movement also known as naturalism, has got to learn that the only sphere in which it can dogmatically speak about truth is the present. Physical evidence is completely incapable of objectively reconstructing the past. No one has a problem when science speaks about the present; about physics, chemistry, geography, etc... The only problem is when it decides that it can suddenly reconstruct all of history! Science is supposed to be about observation right? That's what they claim: science is empirical. So start observing the present and quit shoving metaphysical nonsense down the world's throat about the unobservable past. That is not empirical science's domain.