Feather

What does financial success have to do with genetic fitness? Answer: nothing necessarily. Or, at least, financial success isn't necessarily a good indicator of genetic fitness. Much in the same way that financial success is not necessarily an indicator of intelligence, wisdom, or any other human trait. I think it's a mistake to correlate financial success with any natural trait of humans, in fact.

AtomSmasher

I disagree. First of all, I did not corelate intelligence with financial success, so you are objecting to an unstated premise. However I will say now that it proabably is a factor. Financial success can be caused by many things, but for the most part it is through hard work, ambition, social skills, and entrepreneurship -- all desireable traits. Second, intelligence may not be a determining factor but it sure doesn't hurt. Certainly, sociopaths and people of low intelligence may inherit money or otherwise attain it but in all likelyhood they represent a minority of the financially successfull. Genetic fitness no longer means faster runners and good health, there are an entirely different set of rules that applies to life in society. No matter what, if you can afford to clone yourself, then any genetic factors that contributed to that ability were adaptive traits for your environment, and the proliferation of your genes is the true test of their genetic fitness.

beekay

And now Rael doesn't want the baby DNA tested.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/01/03...ims/index.html

Hmmmmmmmm.....

Seeker196

Pfft, the credibility just went from 0 to -100....

Viti

Yeah, what a shocker...crackpots

L. Noctivagans

Has anyone mentioned the advances in the psychological field that could be made thanks to cloning? Nature vs Nurture could be essentially put to rest. It's pretty tough to find twins raised apart, and almost impossible to find twins who weren't exposed to the same prenatal conditions.

With cloning, we can clone, say, a homosexual, have him gestated in nearly-controlled conditions, raised in a completely different environment, and see what, if anything, affects his sexual preference. We could do the experiment 10 times with the same person, either to test different variable or to reproduce initial results. We can finally determine just how much of an issue genetics is versus socioeconomic status for things like IQ and criminality tendencies. We could eliminate the 'civilized' form of racism by rasing clones of black convicts in better households and watching them not become criminals.

Sure, organs are nice, but the psychiatric and sociological implications of the abilty to create genetically identical clones at will is astounding!

New Atheist

I am ethically against the above. Would you cosider it correct to create and guide the life of ten human beings as an experiment on which one will turn homosexual or not. In general, I'm an atheist and I'm against human cloning, not to stop organs from being made but because I am thinking of the implications this would have on the cloned baby. I think it will be easier for a person to accept who he is when he is produced from two persons rather than be cloned. Consider for xample the case of a erally ungly woman who can't find a husband so gets herself a cloned baby. How will that new born girl feel when, ugly herself, she knows that the only reason she looks the way she does and perhaps feels the way she does is due to the technical birth she had? In a birth where two persons are involved the resulting babies characteristivs is partly desided by chance, so we can live with who we are, we can usually say that "We are who we are". In a cloneing situation we are simply Who our parents chose us to be.

Also though I understand not strictly cloning, but what is you people's view on altering the genetic material of unborn babes for reasons that are not strictly medical (ie to prevent an illness later in life). I'm talking about for example a parent having the genetic material of his baby to have blue eyes for example. Perhaps not possible today but in a few years who knows.

Arrowman

Not that atheists are into dogma or anything....
Which is why I think we need to distinguish between three issues here:
1. Research into cloning technology - animal and human.
2. Use of cloning technology to create human zygotes for particular therapeutic purposes (ie stem cells etc).
3. Use of cloning technology as a reproductive technique for humans.

In a sort of reverse "baby and bathwater" scenario I would hate to think that opposition to 3. (which I oppose pro tem implies opposition to 1. and 2. (which I support).

If I may give my version of Krieger's assertion:

All atheists and non-religious people should oppose any attempts to ban cloning research and the use of cloning for therapeutic reasons, while at the same time we may hold different opinions on the use of cloning for human reproduction. In particular, we must fight to ensure that the public debate on this subject always recognises the distinction between these issues, fight against the blanket condemnation of cloning on purely religious grounds, and strive to ensure that the debate focuses on non-religious ethical issues.
As stated above, I think there is more than one question here. I support research into cloning technology, and in particular research into cloning for therapeutic purposes. I am opposed to the use of cloning for human reproductive purposes on the grounds that it is at this time insufficiently tested and there are too many known problems (such as premature ageing) to justify the creation of cloned humans.
Well I'm no expert but I don't believe there is a difference - perhaps at a micro level there is a difference between the splitting of a fertilised egg and the insertion of DNA into an unfertilised egg, but I'm not sure.

The practical difference is the (currently suspected strong possibility) that clones may suffer from premature ageing - in lay terms, the mature DNA inserted into an egg is already "ageing"; eg Dolly the sheep is either 6 or 11 (IIRC) depending on whether you are looking at the age of her DNA or her date of birth.

There is also the possibility, I think, that in these early days of an as yet imperfect technique, the cloning process may be prone to producing more birth defects (again, in lay terms, the DNA gets "damaged" by the process).

I think there is a danger that we get so awestruck by what has been achieved recently, that we forget how early we are in the research process and how imperfect is our knowledge and our techniques to date.
Hmmm... I think that's a bit glib. There is a big difference between knowing you have an identical twin via a natural reproductive process, and knowing that you were deliberately created as a carbon copy of another human being (eg, one of your parents - some might find that yucky). I think we have a long way to go before we can dismiss such concerns.

Damn that lawyer for threatening legal action. I think his motives are sound, but he's given the Raelians a perfect excuse for ducking their burden of proof.

And it won't make a scrap of difference to their credibility in the eyes of the loonies who fall for this sort of cult, anyway.

55,000 members who "tithe", say very conservatively $1,000 per head, that's $55 million a year. I wish I had his lack of morals. I could be rich.

ps418

It would be grossly unethical to clone simply for the sake of a psychological experiment. But I wouldn't see anything wrong with, say, a mother undergoing IVF twinning one of her embryos, and donating one of the twined embryos to a second, eggless, mother undergoing IVF, and then assessing both children later in life.

Twins reared apart are indeed hard to find. They will become harder to find in the future, because it is now seen as a bad idea to seperate twins. However, there have been like several studies of twins reared apart, which have produced results that agree with each other, with the results of studies of twins reared together, and with the results of longitudinal adoption studies.

These studies all show that parental socioeconomic status (SES) has a modest but real effect on IQ in childhood, but this effect virtually disappears by early adulthood, as do other 'shared environmental effects.' Conversely, the heritability of IQ rises substantially with age. In the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA), where the participants were seperated in infancy and assessed as adults, measures of adoptive parent SES (income, occupation, years of school) showed essentially no correlation at all with adult IQ.

In adoption studies with longitudinal assessment designs, an SES effect on IQ is usually present in childhood, but diminishes over time, such that by early adulthood there is little or no correlation between adoptive parent IQ and SES and child IQ, yet there is a substantial corrrelation between biological parental IQ and child IQ. The consistency of these results across the different experimental designs makes me doubt that the picture would change substantially with clone-rearing experiments.

jayh

Huh? I can't see any legitimate ethicist making *that* objection... sounds like the ill informed reporter is putting words in their mouths.....

This quote from a person whose qualifications are literal belief in mythological tales??????

For that matter what possible qualification do legislators have in this area? What puts them in a position to render a judgement?

Jay