Cloning

This is what always drove me crazy about the cloning debate. People would say things like “will they have souls?” as if that were a serious question. (I wish I had time to look up where I saw that, because it sounds so silly, but I swear on a stack of “Origin of Species” it’s true). The technology of cloning may (or may not) be problematic, but the clone himself (or herself) is self-evidently a human just like any other, in terms of rights, morals, etc.
Interestingly (and completely off-topic), I just opened up a long forgotten A.C. Clarke book “Imperial Earth”, and cloning (along with other interesting issues) is front and center. Uncanny how he foresaw issues that have since come to light.

You’d think these people had hever heard of twins.

I rather suspect some people will be upset at how similiar clones would be – certainly I have known people to become upset when I talk about results from twin studies, e.g. the effect of genetics on religiosity. But anybody with even a sci-fi movie level familiarity with the issue knows that it’s important to raise one’s clone in one’s replicated environment (a great Gene Wolfe story springs to mind as an example of that, and the recent movie The Island presents iirc an example of the difference between original and clone), so I think “I hope public understanding catches up with the reality” is something of a nurturist strawman.

It would produce an animal that looks like Tito, and would be good and worthy as an individual in its own right, but it wouldn’t be Tito.

By the same logic, though, Tito you’ll meet when you come home from work tonight will be an animal that only looks like Tito, but it won’t be Tito you knew when you left in the morning. Bummer. Better get him taxidermied, man.

The question is, does the “P.Z. Meyers” you link to, Kieran, have the same DNA as the P.Z. Myers you link to?

Yamamoto, Rilkefan:

Twin studies don’t really show that environment has no influence on character traits, because identical twins, even if separated at birth, have shared a common environment for a very important first nine months of their coming to be who they are.

Yes, once you understand what human cloning is, it is hard to see many productive uses for it.

Is there a technical term, like monarchy, for a society ruled by a sequence of clones? It does seem perfectly possible for a society like that to exist, although how different it would be from North Korea or Syria isn’t all that clear.

Along the same lines, what’s the medical feasibility of brain transplant into cloned 17 year old body? Does the cloning make that easier?

In which countries could the elites plausibly get away with holding a child prisoner for 17 years and then murdering them?

“Technically achieving the sort of things many people imagine they could do with cloning —recreate a lost child or relative, produce a new version of themselves—would in fact have just the opposite effect.”

Just at the level of syntax, I think this sentence goes astray in an almost but not quite self-contradictory fashion.

What are “the sorts of things many people imagine they could do with cloning”? Answer: recreating a lost child or relative **who would have the personality, memories, outlook, etc. of the original**. You want to say “cloning can’t do that”, and you are right.

But the frame around that clause says “Technically achieving [that] would have the opposite effect,” i.e. would show people that clones don’t have the same personality, memories, etc.

But the “[that]” has switched reference: the thing that we can “technically achieve” is not the thing that “many people imagine”.

‘Cause, look, if we really **could** technically achieve the kind of mental carbon-copying that “many people imagine” would result from cloning, then it would **not** have the opposite effect from what they imagine.

So how about e.g. “Technically achieving the sort of things many people imagine they could do with cloning —recreate a lost child or relative, produce a new version of themselves—may be impossible, and is at any rate something that cloning by itself could never produce. Real cloning–i.e. DNA copying–would make this patently evident.”

Given the resentment that some people display toward their non-cloned offspring for not turning out exactly the same way that they remember themselves to have done, I can’t imagine that the notion of clones as separate beings is going to penetrate all that far into the public consciousness. (Or rather, it will penetrate perfectly well in some populations and not at all in others.)

For pets, I’m not sure that the fact you come up with a similar but not identical animal is really an objection to cloning. Breeders of cats and dogs already select for traits that appear to include baseline personality, so you’d just be doing the same kind of thing with a little more specificity. And the cost might well be comparable to getting a pet from a fancy breeder. Indeed, similar but not identical would probably be a good thing, since you will not be the person who brought up the first version. (There are a lot of objections on a resource-allocation basis, but that’s another matter.)

In despotic countries the child will be held prisoner and then murdered.

In the free countries the child will be held protected and then evicted out of the body according to the legally binding contract.

The best science fiction I’ve read on attempting to make a clone turn out exactly like the original person was C.J. Cherryh’s Cyteen. In the book, the society of Cyteen believes that they need the political and scientific leadership of Ariane Emory, so when she dies, they clone her and do everything they can to replicate the original’s rather troubled childhood. She’s not the first scientific genius her society attempted to replicate, but even though the previous one was a complete failure, they think they can get it right this time. It’s a disturbing and well written story, examining the plausibility and ethics of personal replication.

Dogs, more so than humans, behave very much according to their low level instincts. The way in which a dog might prefer squirrels over birds, points instead of chases, lays its head on your lap or barks at the mailman, has jack shit to do with their experiences or environment. Cloning a dog will very much give you a close replica of a previous dog.

With humans we already know the range of plasticity. Exact clones are mostly a fear of Hollywood and scifi. The anti-cloners prefer a moral argument, albeit a nonsensical one.

Re comment 17: genetic mosaicism produces a random distribution of 2 sets of genes. Among the trillions of cells in a human body, for example, it is trivial to see that the mosaic will tend toward a representation of exactly half those genes for all cariers. In other words, identical female twins will have the same aggregate genetic phenotype.

Cloning would offer a REAL solution to the nature versus nurture debate. We wouldn’t have a few examples, we could literelly create thousands, have them adopted by different people and study their devopmental behavious.
the thing is ,will people accept the results? If nurture seems more important, will tha nature people just scream about the bias of the sociologists overseeing the study? If the inverse is true, will the Nurturists ajust say, like they do with twin studies, that it somehow doesn’t count? The bottom line is that Science is about finding out truth, not being proved right or having your political beliefs reinforced.

Re 23: Are you sure that’s what genetic mosiacism does? I figure if the X chromosome suppresion happens very early in development, the final distrubution would be sort of marbled throughout the body, so that the kind of expression an individual cell has would be highly correlated with the expression of other cells in its immediate vicinity, and not completely random. This means there are potential substantial effects (though perhaps not large effects).

Genetically identical clones, one of whom is shot in the head, will have significantly different subsequent behaviours, starting with rigor mortis and decomposition.

The issue of genetic mosiacism in cloning is a great example of how humans fixate on appearance. A clone of a calico cat will indeed have a completely different fur pattern from the original, however, this does not mean that the cats are somehow not as “identical” as identical twins.

Another way that clones are apt to differ more in experience than twins is in time. Most of my childhood was spent before computers were in the home. A clone of me made now would have access to the Internet from birth. I can’t believe that differing experiences like this would have no effect.

I would think that cloning would be a very high priority for those who are atheist and hold to some sort of meaning to life. That meaning, to survive as a species (talking long term survival of humans). For a time will come when jolly old sun will peter out, but not before a grand plume that will incinerate mother Earth. But before then those striving to survive will need an escape (and destination), and by then genetic modifications will have produced the ideal human for survival on the forever long star trek. Those ‘fittest’ for such a journey would be cloned, not for their unique nurture character traits, but for their nature traits. These trekkers will fulfill the driving force of a godless universe, using their wherewithal to simple survive — the Triumph of the Will!

Now, where is Leni Riefenstahl? We need someone to document this affair.

Bro. Bartleby

#34
Why? Should I ask an anthropologist to stop thinking about ethnicity? Yes, ethnicity may be an uncomfortable subject to some, but if one wants to cast a wider net in this quest for knowledge, then one should be able to handle even some unsightly squid that the net brings up. I do think that cloning would pose fundamentally different questions to one, depending upon their belief in theism or atheism. What do you think?

“I would think that cloning would be a very high priority for those who are atheist and hold to some sort of meaning to life. That meaning, to survive as a species (talking long term survival of humans).”

It’s a failure of imagination to assume that huge numbers of atheists wouldn’t hold to other sorts of meanings.

I think that a cloned person is no more or no less than a twin. Most theists, I would think, would consider cloning of humans to be man playing God. For the atheist, I would think, they would need a very good reason before considering cloning. In my example, the only good reason would be to produce humans with attributes that would benefit their survival in an extreme hostile environment.

pdf23ds: you might want to read up on x-linked early developmental pathways and regulatory systems and developmental timing of x-inactivation. That should answer your question about whole organs being skewed toward one chromosome vs another. They aren’t, excepting unusual disorders. (Because the only unchanging law in biology is that there are exceptions to every rule.)

From the P.Z. Myers quote in the post above:

“Even if cloning were reliable and cheap, I wouldn’t go for it. It would produce an animal that looks like Tito, and would be good and worthy as an individual in its own right, but it wouldn’t be Tito.”

I’m sympathetic to this position. I also understand when people like to switch breeds after favorite dog has died. But many people would stick with a near replacement rather than something completely different. They stay with the breed they like. Cloning would present an opportunity to find a very near replacement and most people would jump at such an opportunity.

What the personal and ethical positions of people like P.Z. Myers or K. Healy are in regard to cloning is, of course, not descriptive of the science underlying cloning and resultant phenotypes.

K.

Perhaps Tito’s ‘personality’ and attributes are all in the mind of Tito’s manservant, hence, a cloned Tito will be the same dear old lovable Tito. And too, the cloned Tito will have the manservant trained in short order.

“That should answer your question about whole organs being skewed toward one chromosome vs another. They aren’t, excepting unusual disorders.”

I don’t pretend to know anything about biology, nor to be terribly interested in patterns of gene expression. But if the patches of fur on a calico, which can measure in the tens of square inches, are representative of X chromosome suppresion, I don’t see why internal organs would be much more evenly divided. But I’d happily accept a correction from someone more knowledgable.

OK, I’ll help your imagination out a bit. I’m an atheist, and I don’t give a damn what happens to the human race. I don’t give a damn when or how I die. All I care about is making my living moments as fulfilling as I can. To that end, I try to overcome various mental problems I was burdened with by my parents, keep myself busy and accomplishing things and interested in things, and try to take care of my social needs. Accomplishing all this, as I expect I may eventually do, would leave me with a quite meaningful life, in my own eyes. So, you could say, the meaning of my life is my own personal happiness.

I’m sure other individual atheists could give you a hundred different answers as to what they find meaningful.

“The survival of the human race” is a basically arbitrary goal. It’s one that happens to be more amenable to human psychology than many others, but it’s not priveleged, and it’s not implied by atheism any more than it’s implied by monotheism or pantheism.

I prefer to content myself with a certain degree of ignorance, so as to avoid madness. I don’t think this is incompatible with living a meaningful life, though.

Also, I can’t agree with the sentiment that evolution has any sort of goal. The tides and waters happen to sometimes produce whirlpools and tornados. Evolution happens to sometimes produce sentience. There’s nothing more to it.

abb1 (7): that’s actually one of the sound buddhist arguments against the existence of a self as one normally understands it. the answer usually is that in all respects, the abb1 of the evening is different from the abb1 of the morning, and that since the self cannot therefore be demonstrated to reside in any given part, the assumed continuity of selfhood is an illusion arising from mistaken agglomeration of experience. or something. update it for the abb1 of 1999 and the abb1 of 2006.

my clone at 38 also has some good points.

…selfhood is an illusion arising from mistaken agglomeration of experience

Yes, but this misfortune of continually changing personhood can be offset somewhat by having no life and very bad memory. That’s how I manage.

Can you imagine jogging on a road paved with gold, not only would it be hard on the feet, but very cold. I think the secret for an atheist to live a fulfilling life is to keep as busy and comfortable as possible. I can see that the life of science would be an ideal environment for this, because one could fill one’s life as a materialistic reductionalist, contently probing the ‘what, when, and how’ questions of the universe, and forever excluding or simply ignoring the ‘why’ questions. Alas, theologians find themselves with the ‘why’ question on their plate, and wrestle with it, even when ‘what/when/how’ folks point their collective fingers and laugh at the sorry sight. But, what can I say, free will made us do it.

bartleby (50):

“From the Big Bang (or any other starting point you wish to imagine), you are the results of a chain of a billion events, and here you are, with that backpack of ‘all time’ on your back, every breath you take is that which moves you into the ever present. And now what? With a Godless universe, you make the rules.”

this is exactly wrong. you just described a chain of events that imposes constraints (‘rules’). in a godless universe you have to discover the rules, and you have no say about what they are, reality being a harsh task-master. that includes the rules for interacting successfully (and into your old age) with other chimpanzees, hence the endless variety of social organisation schemas. it’s in a god-filled universe that you get to make the rules, or defer to those who claim to be speaking on behalf a Big Feller. and if you don’t like their big feller, you get to make your own. rule-creation. at its finest.

re: 58
“Buddha said …”

To acknowledge one will never know the unknown does not negate the innate quest seeking urge that one finds oneself harboring. I know that for me it would be an impossible quest to climb Mr. Everest, yet the effort and all that one would experience trekking up the foothills of that mount would be of great value to me. Yet also, to sit where one finds oneself and to meditate upon one’s present, would also be of great value to me.

“Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.” –Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD)

“…it’s the quality or length of life that bother me.”

Save your money and then cash in, sell all, then travel to India, a place where all the blurring of theism and atheism disappears, there you will find either bliss, or you’ll quickly purchase a ticket back home. Either way, you will change, and I suspect for you, change would be very, very good. (and a bonus, you won’t have to learn a new language)