What do you think of cloning?

[Jenab]

What do you think of cloning? I have really been thinking about this since I read the synopsis to the new movie Godsend that is coming out with Robert DeNiro. A major part of the movie has to do with cloning a couple's child who is killed by a car and bringing him back. Any thoughts?? Moral, ethical or otherwise?

There's a lot of moralizing up tempests in teapots on the subject of cloning.

 

Persons with especially favorable genetic endowments - naturally gifted physical and mental superstars - might be "saved" like a computer program and replicated if the original person dies prematurely, or duplicated to facilitate the natural re-infusion of positive traits in a weakened race.

 

If a horse breeder could clone his best stallion, I expect that he would.

 

The reason for the moralizing on cloning might be the very eugenic utility that cloning offers. We may take notice that in nature two similar species, or subspecies, with similar demands on the environment, are natural competitors. When there isn't enough for both groups, they usually struggle against one another for mastery, along with which comes principal access to the contested resources.

 

One thing a competitor wants to do is deny advantages to its opponent. If cloning represents a technically feasible advantage to one group, we might expect that an opposed group would attempt to blackguard it with trumped up denunciations heavily larded with pseudo-morality. Whether this applies to our situation, I'll leave that to others to judge.

 

Jerry Abbott

[Sayonara]

The main reason people object to cloning on moral grounds is usually that the cloned person would not have a "soul", hence the "we should not play god" argument.

 

Of course, this roughly translates to "if you people make a human clone and it is just like you and me, and doesn't have black eyes and a complete lack of humanity, there there probably isn't a soul and our moralising about god will look quite silly - so we'd rather nobody ever tried kthx bye."

[admiral_ju00]

i hate reviving old threads but i'd really like an answer to this;

 

I already did. Can you guess which signature is mine?

 

by the way, reading some of those responces was simply amazing. how gullible and naive people are is amazing. case in point: BubbaGump04 and his moronic petition

[Jenab]

The main reason people object to cloning on moral grounds is usually that the cloned person would not have a "soul"' date=' hence the "we should not play god" argument.

 

Of course, this roughly translates to "if you people make a human clone and it is just like you and me, and doesn't have black eyes and a complete lack of humanity, there there probably isn't a soul and our moralising about god will look quite silly - so we'd rather nobody ever tried kthx bye."[/quote']

I'm not sure that it's as innocent as sparing religion from the embarrassment of evidence against gods and souls. I think it's more along the lines of this:

 

"Your breed is a competitor/enemy of our breed. Cloning, like most other eugenic measures, could provide you with longterm advantages over us. Therefore, we will persuade you not to clone the genetically better people on your side, and the arguments we present will deceptively use your religion as a smokescreen, as a way to confuse you, as a cover for our intentions."

 

Jerry Abbott

[Sayonara]

i hate reviving old threads but i'd really like an answer to this;

loll0r: You chumps are pretty ignorant. The Godsend Institute is a complete fraud - they are NOT capable of cloning humans. They are LYING. The whole thing is fraudulent.

 

"All cloning is immoral"? Tell that to the children this broad technology is keeping alive.

 

Let's all jump on the moral outwage bandwagon, whoooppeee!

There you go.

[Sayonara]

I'm not sure that it's as innocent as sparing religion from the embarrassment of evidence against gods and souls. I think it's more along the lines of this:

 

"Your breed is a competitor/enemy of our breed. Cloning' date=' like most other eugenic measures, could provide you with longterm advantages over us. Therefore, we will persuade you not to clone the genetically better people on your side, and the arguments we present will deceptively use your religion as a smokescreen, as a way to confuse you, as a cover for our intentions."[/quote']

We can carry out eugenics programs without cloning.

[Jenab]

We can carry out eugenics programs without[/i'] cloning.

Yes, that is possible. But cloning would add efficiency when an exceptionally fine human offspring, especially a female, appears by the normal method. Females are a bottleneck in human reproduction: they can have one (or at most a few) babies at a time, and a very able and talented female might divert herself in other ways; e.g., with a time-consuming career. Cloning could come to the rescue of her genetic endowment, so that it would not be lost to posterity in the event she decides to fritter away her eggs while chasing criminals, or fighting fires, or flying commercial jets, or defending bad guys in a courtroom somewhere.

 

Jerry Abbott

[Sayonara]

But it would be easier and cheaper to avoid cloning in eugenics.

 

A society that wants to create a super race and would use 'evil' cloning to get there is not going to have many issues with forced breeding programs.

[Jenab]

But it would be easier and cheaper to avoid cloning in eugenics.

 

A society that wants to create a super race and would use 'evil' cloning to get there is not going to have many issues with forced breeding programs.

Rather than "super" race, why not just say "better" race, with more strengths and fewer weaknesses. Supermen (and -women) is an excellent social goal, one which would pay dividends in many ways. Suppose that no one were nearsighted, or diabetic, or retarded. Suppose that no one was predisposed, by whatever means heredity influences behavior, to be a criminal? And on top of that, imagine what positive things a stronger, smarter, wiser, and more talented race might achieve.

 

So, rather that suggest speculative nightmares emerging from a supposed loss of personal rights in a eugenically oriented society, recognize that the real nightmare is in the society that we have now. The society that breeds misfits, and supports the misfits so that they can breed some more, and so on, until our society simply collapses because too many of its members have become too congenitally inept to keep things going.

 

Jerry Abbott

[Sayonara]

That doesn't really answer my point, does it?

 

By that token the explanation you gave in reply #54 would be a weak argument from an insignificant fringe.

[admiral_ju00]

But cloning would add efficiency when an exceptionally fine human offspring' date=' especially a female, appears by the normal method. Females are a bottleneck in human reproduction: they can have one (or at most a few) babies at a time..........

[/quote']

 

really? and here i was, thinking that even a one child can be a burden to many to raise, feed, cloth and educate.

how many babies do you suppose they should produce each time then?

 

you make it sound as if the human race is on the brink of extinction and women are in serious trouble because they can only produce usually 1 offspring at a time....

 

rofl

[Jenab]

So, rather that suggest speculative nightmares emerging from a supposed loss of personal rights in a eugenically oriented society, recognize that the real nightmare is in the society that we have now. The society that breeds misfits, and supports the misfits so that they can breed some more, and so on, until our society simply collapses because too many of its members have become too congenitally inept to keep things going.

That doesn't really answer my point, does it?

Actually, it does answer your point, but maybe too much was implied. I'll try again more explicitly.

 

The value of freedom is conditioned. Before a specific freedom (a right) can have any value, there must exist an organism able to use it wisely; especially without incurring through its use any accumulation of backlash from - more or less - the laws of nature.

 

For example, building of a civilization dependent on fossil fuels was foolish. When fossil fuels are no longer sufficient to meet its energy requirements, civilization will at least decline, and might even crash, killing millions of people by starvation, disease and war. Mankind used a freedom that its decision-making institutions were insufficiently wise to use well, and as a result accumulated a backlash from the laws of nature.

 

The value of the freedom to breed with whichever willing mate one likes is also conditioned. If it leads to better and better people who live in better and better circumstances, then fine: it has a positive value. If it leads, instead, to an accumulation of physical and mental defectiveness, a decline in moral behavior, and a trend toward the extinction of the practitioners of that freedom, then it is a bad thing. However much people want it, the wanting is as a child wants to eat poisoned candy.

 

If a child can't summon the wisdom not to eat poisoned candy - if all he cares about is the immediate enjoyment of the taste - then it is well for someone wiser to take the candy out of his hands and put it where he can't get to it again. Likewise for the freedom to breed at will.

 

Jerry Abbott

[Jenab]

really? and here i was' date=' thinking that even a one child can be a burden to many to raise, feed, cloth and educate.

how many babies do you suppose they should produce each time then?

 

you make it sound as if the human race is on the brink of extinction and women are in serious trouble because they can only produce usually 1 offspring at a time....

 

rofl[/quote']

Although every person needs to eat, and pretty much everyone has about the same requirements for food energy, not everyone is equal when it comes to putting that energy to productive use. Some people create more problems than they solve. Some people solve more problems than they create.

 

No one would suggest that cloning be used to propagate the defective, the lazy, the criminal: the burdens and the troublemakers. Certainly I would not suggest such a thing. Rather than clone them, sterilize them.

 

The cloning would be reserved for people who have shown that they can make large and positive contributions to their race.

 

Jerry Abbott

[admiral_ju00]

 

For example' date=' building of a civilization dependent on fossil fuels was foolish. When fossil fuels are no longer sufficient to meet its energy requirements, civilization will at least decline, and might even crash, killing millions of people by starvation, disease and war. Mankind used a freedom that its decision-making institutions were insufficiently wise to use well, and as a result accumulated a backlash from the laws of nature.[/quote']

 

last time i checked, Nuclear power was far more superior than fossil fuel. so an end to Fossil fuels will not mean the end of civilization as you've just stated. simply look at france, which i believe gets about 80%(+/-) of all it's power from Nuclear Power plants and i see no such things as you predicted.

 

The value of the freedom to breed with whichever willing mate one likes is also conditioned. If it leads to better and better people who live in better and better circumstances, then fine: it has a positive value. If it leads, instead, to an accumulation of physical and mental defectiveness, a decline in moral behavior, and a trend toward the extinction of the practitioners of that freedom, then it is a bad thing. However much people want it, the wanting is as a child wants to eat poisoned candy.

 

that's absurd

[admiral_ju00]

No one would suggest that cloning be used to propagate the defective' date=' the lazy, the criminal: the burdens and the troublemakers. Certainly I would not suggest such a thing. Rather than clone them, sterilize them.

 

The cloning would be reserved for people who have shown that they can make large and positive contributions to their race.

 

Jerry Abbott[/quote']

 

now where have i heard a similar notion before........

oh yeah the Nazi's and their idea of purifying the world of such undesirables as you've mentioned and replace them all with pure-bred Aryans.....

 

if cloning a fully functional human w/o major problems becomes possible and the resulting person is 100% identical to it's natural other, then it should be available to all who needs it. not all criminals are monsters, some were simply at the right place at the wrong time, etc.

and to most parents, their child deserves equal respect as a human being as the next person.

granted, there are some 'defects' in the society, eg: mass murderers, serial psychopaths, people down syndrome or otherwise mentally or physically handicapped, etc. but they are the minority.

[Sayonara]

Actually, it does answer your point, but maybe too much was implied.

No, it really really doesn't. Perhaps you didn't understand my point at all. You aren't even discussing the point you were trying to make any more.

 

The value of the freedom to breed with whichever willing mate one likes is also conditioned. If it leads to better and better people who live in better and better circumstances, then fine: it has a positive value. If it leads, instead, to an accumulation of physical and mental defectiveness, a decline in moral behavior, and a trend toward the extinction of the practitioners of that freedom, then it is a bad thing. However much people want it, the wanting is as a child wants to eat poisoned candy.

Argh my eyes.

[Sayonara]

Although every person needs to eat' date=' and pretty much everyone has about the same requirements for food energy, not everyone is equal when it comes to putting that energy to productive use. Some people create more problems than they solve. Some people solve more problems than they create.

 

No one would suggest that cloning be used to propagate the defective, the lazy, the criminal: the burdens and the troublemakers. Certainly I would not suggest such a thing. Rather than clone them, sterilize them.

 

The cloning would be reserved for people who have shown that they can make large and positive contributions to their race.[/quote']

Being lazy, criminal or "troublemakers", productive or useful to society - these are all products of ENVIRONMENT. They are not qualities that can be cloned.

 

If you want to make this super society, don't use cloning. It's difficult, expensive, and it would take a generation before you saw results, during which time society would doubtless change anyway.

[Jenab]

last time i checked, Nuclear power was far more superior than fossil fuel. so an end to Fossil fuels will not mean the end of civilization as you've just stated. simply look at france, which i believe gets about 80%(+/-) of all it's power from Nuclear Power plants and i see no such things as you predicted.

France has limited domestic energy resources, and dependence on imported fuels is a politically hot topic there. France generates 77% of its electricity from nuclear reactors. It's automobiles and tractors run on the same kind of gasoline we use. France gets its plastics and its agricultural fertilizers from petroleum, just as we do.

 

Fossil fuels currently provide 3/4 of the world's energy. In order to supplant fossil fuels with nuclear reactors, it would be necessary to build 5,000 to 10,000 new reactors, and there is no longer time in which this can be done.

 

I predict that you will soon live in a world in which working cars and trucks are much less abundant than they are today, due to the depletion of fossil fuels. Eventually, you'll also see the breakdown of industrial agriculture and the depopulation of the world by starvation.

 

The value of the freedom to breed with whichever willing mate one likes is also conditioned. If it leads to better and better people who live in better and better circumstances, then fine: it has a positive value. If it leads, instead, to an accumulation of physical and mental defectiveness, a decline in moral behavior, and a trend toward the extinction of the practitioners of that freedom, then it is a bad thing. However much people want it, the wanting is as a child wants to eat poisoned candy.

that's absurd

 

No, it isn't. A dysgenic trend in the White race from the beginning of the 20th century, is obvious. The principal causes of that trend are wars, feminism, and liberal social programs.

 

When the fitter men were sent to war, inspired by largely fictitious propaganda to kill each other, other men, being mentally and physically unfit for military service, stayed home and enjoyed enhanced access to women.

 

Feminism took the smarter and more motivated women out of the home and put them into the workplace. Instead of being mothers first, they became [put job title here] first, and motherhood often had to wait, and wait, and...oops, too late. The number of children per woman declined. The White birthrate for the past 50 years has been below replacement, with the shortfall in births being mainly in the genetically better women. Feminism culled good qualities out of our race worse than the wars did.

 

Liberal social programs burdened the more capable people so that the less capable could have unearned money. Politically, the idea was sold as "safety nets," but what it really did was transfer childbirth from the better human stock to the lower grades. Workers had to carry non-workers on their backs, paying to raise their children as well as any they had themselves.

 

No one would suggest that cloning be used to propagate the defective, the lazy, the criminal: the burdens and the troublemakers. Certainly I would not suggest such a thing. Rather than clone them, sterilize them. The cloning would be reserved for people who have shown that they can make large and positive contributions to their race.

now where have i heard a similar notion before........

oh yeah the Nazi's and their idea of purifying the world of such undesirables as you've mentioned and replace them all with pure-bred Aryans.....

Why do you suppose "undesirables" are undesired? Because they make trouble. They cause problems. At best' date=' they are a burden that no one wants to carry and should not be required to. At worst, they are an active evil that seeks the destruction of the host people who unwisely let them in, being to a nation what a virus is to an organism.

 

It's a defect in one's judgment to imply that the Nazis always got everything wrong. Maybe once in a while they did the right thing. When you really think about results - "what are the longterm consequences of these trends?" - you will usually arrive at the conclusion that the Nazis were right about eugenics.

 

if cloning a fully functional human w/o major problems becomes possible and the resulting person is 100% identical to it's natural other, then it should be available to all who needs it. not all criminals are monsters, some were simply at the right place at the wrong time, etc.

Normal reproduction should be controlled on the basis of genetic quality, with seriously defective persons being permitted no children at all, average people being permitted one or two, somewhat gifted people being allowed three or four, and, for the very best, "no limit", incentives to have more babies, and cloning to insure that an especially propitious genotype does not perish from the world.

[Sayonara]

Jenab, a lot of what you are saying makes good sense but it is not evidence that cloning is a "bad thing".

 

It's more along the lines of "this would be a bad way to apply cloning... for some people".

[Jenab]

Being lazy, criminal or "troublemakers", productive or useful to society - these are all products of ENVIRONMENT. They are not qualities that can be cloned. If you want to make this super society, don't use cloning. It's difficult, expensive, and it would take a generation before you saw results, during which time society would doubtless change anyway.

There are probably environmental factors in the formation of character, but the genetic factors are probably dominant. Intelligence is about 80% inherited (Arthur Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?", Harvard Educational Review, 1969). Metabolic efficiency is probably inherited, too. Harmonal balances, likewise. If, say, one race had more homone-induced aggression and a lower intelligence than another, then it would not be surprising if members of the (relatively) stupid and aggressive race were arrested more frequently for violent crimes.

 

Cloning wouldn't be used universally. It would be reserved for those persons having an exceptionally good genetic endowment, as measured by objective tests of physical and mental abilities.

 

Jerry Abbott

[Jenab]

Jenab' date=' a lot of what you are saying makes good sense but it is not evidence that cloning is a "bad thing".

 

It's more along the lines of "this would be a bad way to apply cloning... for some people".[/quote']

RIGHT! Cloning is not a bad thing. Just as sexual reproduction isn't a bad thing. But there are right ways and wrong ways to use a good thing, and you judge them by their results, or by your estimate of their results, being informed by history about the success or failure of similar situations.

[Sayonara]

All this time I thought we were discussing why the average Joe* opposes cloning

 

 

* the inference being of course that you have put more effort into your doom scenario than the average Joe.

[Z-space]

Going back to the opening discussion of this thread: If a child was cloned from cells taken from that child's body, then by definition the clone would be an exact replica of the original - from its external appearance to its biochemical and neural circuits. If the clone was raised by the same parents and exposed to the same environment, then environmental factors would have only a very minimal affect on the child's personality. The clone would have the same interests and likes/dislikes as the original.

[Ms. DNA]

Going back to the opening discussion of this thread: If a child was cloned from cells taken from that child's body, then by definition the clone would be an exact replica of the original - from its external appearance to its biochemical and neural circuits. If the clone was raised by the same parents and exposed to the same environment, then environmental factors would have only a very minimal affect on the child's personality. The clone would have the same interests and likes/dislikes as the original.

 

In effect, you're creating a clone/original pair that would be like a pair of identical twins. But even identical twins can be exposed to different environments. For instance, one twin can get the lion's share of nutrients in the womb, which would result in a higher birth weight, which can have implications on future health. See the link below for other examples of ways in which identical twins can differ.

 

http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf074/sf074b09.htm

[Z-space]

Ms. DNA: Thank you for the interesting link. You are correct in pointing out that there can be some differences between identical twins. However, a clone is not an identical twin. The key is provided in the second paragraph of the link you posted: "Of course, such twins are genetically different, but they are still monozygotic (from the same egg)." Clones are not genetically different from each other. They are by definition genetically identical, and replicate the original at every level of the organism. So a cloned child would be a replica of the original child and not its identical twin equivalent.