Let's talk about morality.

America has a strong consensus about a lot things even as we are divided on others:



What surprises you the most here? Are you surprised that 80% of Americans say suicide is morally wrong? I've often had to struggle with commenters on this blog when I have taken the firm position that suicide is murder, but I think America mostly agrees with me. There is generally an outpouring of sympathy when someone commits suicide. Why don't we express our moral opprobrium toward the self-murderer? I think it's because that person is gone, and we feel sorry for those who are left behind. They are the victims.

Doctor-assisted suicide is an important subcategory of suicide, and the Gallup report says that it "emerges as the most controversial cultural issue in Gallup's 2011 Values and Beliefs poll." But what is notable is that support for assisted suicide has been dropping and has reached its lowest level of support in 8 years.

"If the mammoth can be resurrected, the same would be technically possible for Neanderthals."

With some old hair and $10 million, scientists have a way to construct a real live mammoth, and they can't help thinking about making a Neanderthal man:

But the process of genetically engineering a human genome into the Neanderthal version would probably raise many objections, as would several other aspects of such a project. “Catholic teaching opposes all human cloning, and all production of human beings in the laboratory, so I do not see how any of this could be ethically acceptable in humans,” said Richard Doerflinger, an official with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

[George Church, a well known genome technologist at the Harvard Medical School] said there might be an alternative approach that would “alarm a minimal number of people.” The workaround would be to modify not a human genome but that of the chimpanzee, which is some 98 percent similar to that of people. The chimp’s genome would be progressively modified until close enough to that of Neanderthals, and the embryo brought to term in a chimpanzee.

Got a problem with that?

IN THE COMMENTS: jprapp said:

And Hymowitz thinks men these days are angry. Just wait ‘til real Neanderthals try love in the age of Darwin via assortative mating, only to find pair-bond partners with angry Yale Law grads. Genetics ain't all it's cracked up to be. Until an epigenetic (ala genome) project is completed, I’ll stick with Crichton.

(I added the link to Tuesday's discussion of the Hymowitz article.) I responded:

Crichton died, but we can rebuild him from some fingernail clippings.

Now, I see Brian Lundmark has already cartooned that.