Cousins and consequences

A detailed examinition of the recent hominid remains found on the Indonesian island of Flores last year have confirmed (or at least very strongly suggested) that "Hobbits" were indeed our cousins, rather than being modern pygmies. But the real question still remains unanswered: what happened to them? Stories of the Ebu Gogo date to the post-European contact era; have they died out, or are they still there? And if so, what could they tell us about ourselves?

Coincidentally, I've just read an essay in A Devil's Chaplain ("Son of Moore's Law") in which Richard Dawkins argues that the effects of meeting a surviving (or recreated) hominid species would forever undermine our present moral distinctions based on absolute but essentially morally arbitrary species barriers. He revisits this argument in a post-Hobbit article in the LA Times:

[T]o meet another human species would be a soul-building experience. Besides, the live discovery I wistfully imagined would turn human complacency on its head. Our speciesism accepts a vast moral gulf between Homo sapiens and every other animal. Nice people will unquestioningly value the life of a human embryo above that of an adult chimpanzee. The chimpanzee thinks and feels, enjoys love and suffers fear, yet moral absolutists feel no unease at the killing, or selling, of a captive chimpanzee. Simultaneously, they see an infinite moral objection to the "murder" of a brainless, senseless human embryo.

What would become of such a double standard in the face of a living - and perhaps suffering - Homo floresiensis?

And if Flores Woman indeed belongs in the genus Homo, she might be capable of interbreeding with us - and therefore of shaking absolutist morality to its ill-considered foundations. (Please, somebody, go out to Flores and search.)

But simply the knowledge of H. floresiensis's recent existence should have the same effect. Few people could hear the news of their discovery without considering, even for an instant, whether they were "people". But even asking the question undermines speciesist moral thinking; it no longer becomes a question of "can I theoretically breed with you" (which, spelled out, seems an exceptionally poor basis for morality) but one of recognition of shared traits which don't necessarily follow species boundaries. And once that is acknowledged, speciesism crumbles; you can't include all humans without also including some animals (particularly other primates), and you can't exclude those animals without also excluding some humans (such as embryos, the mentally retarded, and even young children). Our old moral boundaries are left looking disturbingly similar to the National Front's: based on something essentially arbitrary and irrelevant.