As of our understanding now, Neanderthals were Homo sapiens neanderthal where as we are Homo sapiens sapiens.  We could most certainly have created infertile offspring and at the time of their existence, possibly even fertile offspring (caucasians are now known to have Neanderthal genes.)  There is still debate as to whether they are technically the same biological species as we are.

When I talk about species hybridization in science fiction, I'm talking about mixing, say, a parrot with a pig or even a cow with a horse.  Not going to happen. 

The 'Booms!' have echoes, it seems.  [e digicons]:\[/e]

The reasoning lies in the complexities of proteins, steroids, lipids, enzymes, sachyrides, etc. and tha massive number of interactions they have with one another.  Most genes produce or regulate one of these mechanisms and each one generally has a broad range of influence.  It's not like building with legos.  You can't just snap away a part of a body and clamp on another.  If you were to compare it with legos, each lego would connect in some way to every other lego in the construct, with the contruct being billions of legos large.  Remove one lego and or insert one, and you'll probably be okay.  Remove two, and it'll probably all fall apart.  I definately agree that one day there will be the technology to mix in match in spectacular ways--- but by the time we have that technology, our computers will be so powerful that doing so would be quaint and pointless.  I'm skeptical that humans would even be around at that point.

My main point is that science fiction grossly, grossly simplifies the complexities of swapping around genes.  In the end, it would be easier to create a creature like the one from "Splice" from scratch rather than mix around genes from existing organisms.

Yeap. It's pretty decent too. It's kinda a rip off of "Species" though. The storyline isn't "ground-breaking" by any means, but I was reasonably entertained. It's got a few "Hot" scenes as well. It's worth a watch.

You guys will someday be seen as a primitive species as well. How do you want to be talked about?

That's true, the real science of biology has very little to do with science fiction. Actually, in my opinion thinking in terms of mixing around genes from existing organisms is kind of the wrong way to approach the big picture. Existing organisms will eventually provide what is essentially a map or manual of genetics. They will teach us how genetics works and instructions on how to properly assemble new life. Now, keep in mind that my eventually doesn't mean 10 years, 50 years or even 100 years .. might take much longer than a century or not, I really have no clue but that's not relevant. So creating things from scratch is exactly the right way to go about doing things eventually. However with humans we probably want to maintain our sense of self, so we don't want to create humans anew, just do tweaking. That's more of a philosophical discussion though. An interesting one, but still.

We also agree on the complexity and how fragile the whole system is. I just believe that eventually we're able to master it. If you let me sidtrack for a second, in my opinion understarding thoroughly how life works will be much easier than getting to the bottom of the big questions about universe. In fact, I think life is pretty simple compared to space and the origin of everything, and I trust getting to the bottom of that is not impossible, either.

In the quoted post is one more thing I disagree with you though. I believe using lifeforms and genetics is crucial to reach the next step in effectiveness. Applying genetics to technological solutions will hardly be pointless. Also, I'm not completely convinced (though it's not impossible) that computers will advance so far that we're able to replace life with them. If that's what you meant by making genetics pointless when computers are powerful enough. My apologies if I understood you wrong.

By the way, I hope you'll find the time to read the Economist's special report I gave the link to a few posts back unless you already read it.

DNA and biological components are a bit incidental and primitive.  They are sticky and mired in billions of years of sloppy evolution.  As you know, evolution is not a very efficient process.  It twists and morphs existing features to serve new and novel functions (look at a frail and contorted bird's wing, for instance.)  Humorously, the greatest evidence against Intelligent Design is that... organisms are very clearly poorly "designed."  The human brain too has scores of redundancies and inefficiencies, too.  Trying to undo them so that you can make something else out of them would seem harder than using a new material that isn't biological to get the job done.

So I'm very convinced that we will create intelligent, self-learning machines far before we are mixing and matching different lifeforms or even building complex and intelligent life forms from the ground up.  Have you ever heard of Computational Theory of Mind?  It basically posits that the brain is a highly complex computer, and neurologists have been able to identify with a fair amount of precision how many bits of information a brain can compute.  So if the brain is a computer, it stands to reason that we can create a machine computer that can process as much as the human brain.

Moore's Law states that computer processing power doubles roughly every 2 years.  The law has held remarkably firm for 70 years and if it continues to hold true, we'll have computers that are as powerful as the human brain by around the year 2030 (that's assuming we've moved away from integrated circuit and transistor computers and toward optical or quantum computers, otherwise we're probably looking at 2040.)

How long will it take us to build an artificial biological lifeform from scratch?  Far, far longer.  So my point is why build biological lifeforms when you have been building far better computer based lifeforms for much longer?  In the end, you would need a computer far more powerful than the human brain just to alter the human brain in any meaningful way through gene interaction.  Granted, I doubt we'd be making computer's to think like humans. 

And yes, I'm very familiar with Craig Venter's work and had read about it from other sources (so I only skimmed your links).

Well, the limit with our current transistor technology will reach a cap around 2020.  However, we have had multiple computer revolutions in the past 60 years and Moores law didn't slow down one bit.  Likely, we'll be seeing optical computers arriving in the near future that will transcend our former computer schemas.

But like I said before, it's unlikely we would bother making "human intelligence" for a computer (why replicate behavioral patterns in the digital age of a creature that evolved in the stone age??)  So we can expect to see computers of equivalent power of the human brain, but not built to pursue resources so that it may survive to reproduce like we do.

So far, the evidence would seem to support my prediction that digital technology will grow faster than biological technology.  Computer technology has grown exponentially for 60 years with virtually no pitfalls.  Biological technology has not.