Nic Tamzek

Well, at least the title isn't "Attack of the Clones", "Send in the Clones", etc.

Here's the NPR story:

ID-similarity blue.

edited to conform to fair use/copyright sorts of things

Nic Tamzek

A caller on today's Talk of the Nation was a Raelian. His argument for cloning was something like:

"I think cloning is good because it makes us immortal and this is good"

...which rivals the confusion seen in many YEC statements IMO.

What really bugs me about cloning is that people, even anti-clone people, assume that the clone will be not just genetically identical, but also *be them* in some mystical way. But they won't. If raised separate from its <bleeped>-up mother, that kid would be just another kid.

One of the major unrecognized dangers in cloning is, I think, the victimization of the cloned children under the delusions of their creators *and* the clone-opposers. It's already hard enough for kids to live up to their parents' expectations as it is...

All of the above is above and beyond the usual problems both with the dubious truth of the Raelians' claim and with reproductive cloning in general.

Nic Tamzek

I just realized that discussion of this topic is going on over in the Science & Skepticism forum, perhaps this should go there.

pz

Yeah, but your title is much better, and you're comparing it to the ID movement. It doesn't hurt to leave it here, I think.

sakrilege

Isn't it more accurate to consider the cloned child as a type of identical twin rather than a copy?

Nic Tamzek

OK, cool.

I just saw Rael on Fox News.

Rael:


Brigitte Boisselier, founder of clone-aid and "Raelian bishop":


It was actually a little hard to tell who was more incoherant, Rael or the FoxNews interviewer. The latter was putting on a kind of for-the-conservatives-indignancy show.

All I can say is, truth is stranger than fiction. The similarity between Raelianism and ID was pointed out by Robert Pennock back in 1999. A few things that they seem to have in common:

1) A profound non-understanding of biology

2) An inappropriate tendency to believe in the genetic fallacy in reverse. I.e.:

Original genetic fallacy (one of several): we were created by the natural process of evolution, therefore life is pointless/the ultimate purpose of humans is survival/those who survive, deserve to survive.

ID/Raelian genetic fallacy: we were created by intelligence, therefore we should do whatever the designer says we should.

Nic Tamzek

Yes. Assuming no defects (dubious assumption), the child would just be another kid, with their own personal experiences and individuality, and all of the same rights of a unique individual.

Some of the scariest implications of cloning are those who think they could be treated as spare-parts banks (need a new heart? Make a clone...).

Another scary one is what Rael himself said on Fox News: the purpose of cloning is to make humans immortal. The way this is supposed to work is that when your current body is about to kick the bucket, you (somehow) download your brain into the clone and continue on as if nothing had happened.

The clone's opinions on this procedure appear to not be being considered.

I rather strongly doubt that this could ever work, so here is a more likely possibility: a cloned child would be raised in a designed environment, memorize the teachings, history, etc. of the parent, perhaps being subjected to the same experiences, and in that way approximate the production of a mental clone. I doubt that this would ever work, either, but it might succeed in producing some very screwed-up human beings.

In conclusion, reproductive cloning is almost inherently an egotistical, megalomanaical act. We've got plenty of humans already (by an entirely more enjoyable method ), and plenty of reproductive therapies that will work as well or better than cloning, so there is no good reason to do it.

Even "spare parts" production will, I'm sure, soon be much more easily done by programming stem cells.

The usually-mentioned problems of health problems for the child, etc., are all worth talking about, but the most severe problems above seem to not be being discussed.

It does, though, show that biological un-educated-ness is far more widespread than just in evolutionary matters.

Nic Tamzek

Another similarity between ID and Raelianism:

"Scientific" announcements being made to the media rather than the scientific community.


One difference:

Raelians claim to have actual physical results in their media announcements. The DI could take a page from Rael's book here, you get alot more press when you do this...

http://www.rael.org/

...appears to be down, probably due to too many hits.

You can bet that they'll be getting alot more adherents with this news, even if the clone claims prove to be bunk.

pz

Yes, I agree completely. I would also add that cloning is a difficult business, so difficult that I do not believe the Raelians have done it. It is extremely error-prone, in large part because it is in many ways to refer to the egg as being in a completely undifferentiated state: it is actually a cell in an extremely specialized state, containing a copy of the genome that has been primed for development. It isn't trivial to reset a transplanted genome into that particular condition, and all of the approaches now basically boil down to randomly shocking it, letting it develop, and selecting out the tiny percentage that were fortuitously tumbled into a functional totipotent state. In the case of Dolly, the cloned sheep, they lucked into that once in a few hundred trials.

For that reason, I'd say a cloned individual would be less like its genetic sibling than a monozygotic twin would be. It's starting from a weirdly scrambled starting point, and who knows what consequences that would have had?

sakrilege

All right, let me show my ignorance...

Isn't cloning essentially asexual reproduction? There are species that reproduce that way but so few that it is highly unusual. Sexual reproduction has all the advantages of diversity. Are there any advantages to asexual reproduction?