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Scientists To Open Mass-Cloning Factory in China This Year To Clone Cows, Pets, Humans (express.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists in China are planning to open a mass-cloning factory by the end of the year. The ambitious and futuristic facility hopes to be mass-producing one million cows every 12 months by 2020. Not only will it clone cattle, but the factory, which will be located in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, will also cater to more specific needs by genetically engineering police dogs and thoroughbred race horses. It is part of a $21m plan which is backed by the Boyalife group in collaboration with South Korean company Sooam Biotech Research Foundation.
It's just you. The world is not completely natural any more and we have been practicing artificial selection for ages.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
Selective breeding is analogous to using mother nature's tools, within mother nature's workshop, to guide the otherwise natural course of evolution. That's precisely why human beings have been able to do it for ages: because it relies on nothing more than mother nature.
Genetic engineering is something entirely different. Clearly, genetic engineering does NOT use mother nature's tools, but rather a toolkit which isn't found anywhere in nature. And clearly, genetic engineering does NOT work within the rules of mother nature's workshop, but rather outside of them completely. This is precisely why human beings have not been able to do this until very recently in the course of our technical evolution: because it requires much more than mother nature's toolkit and workshop.
The two procedures aren't even remotely comparable, even if they do attempt to achieve a similar goal. Note that I haven't actually spoken out against genetic engineering here. I've only laid out a common-sense argument why genetic engineering isn't comparable to selective breeding.
Which seems rather scary in the long run. I recall once reading something where the author speculated that one of the largest reasons for the disproportionate amount of violence in the Middle East was due to the cultural and religious customs allowing men to have multiple wives. Since almost every country has a roughly even infant sex ratio this means that there were a large number of young men who had no prospect of finding a mate which contributed to the willingness to commit violence or engage in suicide bombings.
China might not experience the same problems or those problems in exactly the same way due to other aspects of their culture, but having a large part of the population being potentially unable to satisfy some of their most basic human desires seems like a recipe for problems down the road.
Think about fruit trees. Just about any fruit you buy at a grocery store will have come from clonally propagated (grafted) tree. Every Fuji apple comes from a clone of the original Fuji tree and so on.
Suppose that a specific cow has beautifully marbled meat or really high milk production. You could breed that cow, and hope that its offspring has the same trait, or you can clone that cow and virtually guarantee it.
Twin studies don't disprove the importance of genetics when it comes to outcomes, they prove it. Plus, a factory farm raised animal is not going to have nearly the environmental variation as a human or a pet.