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First cloned human embryo revealed
Stephen Williams sent us the BBC story that American Cell Technology had successfully cloned a human embryo, using a cell from a man's leg and a cow. The embryo was destroyed at 12 days-just prior to when naturally the embryo implants into the uterine wall. They did so wanting to "try and allay fears over artificial life." Wow. The Boys from Brazil indeed-what do you folks think?
This is a great step forward. It'll be a great day when we can farm brainless bodies for spare parts. (Wonder if we could actually transplant portions of the brain some day?)
We are approaching a time where certain people may not die in the sense we previously expected. Live to 100, clinically die, wake up with your brain in a fresh new body. Sounds good to me.
I want to clone my ex-wife! Man, she looked GOOOOD, but what a bitch. With a clone, I could train her RIGHT. On second thought, I could have her cloned half a dozen times! Wow, the possibilities are endless.
Cows are people too! Moooo!
...been violated once again, in a radically new fashion.
I worry about the mental state of anyone who isn't disturbed by this.
They'll probably be wanting to use sheep eggs.....Hell, they'll probably not even worry about artificial insemination!
... but this is ridiculous.
Some thoughts:
- If I clone myself, do I/we have two votes or one votes in elections?
- If I clone myself, and then kill myself: Is this murder? Do I still live?
- If I clone myself twice, and we kill one clone, Who has to go to prison, if any?!
The tools we use have always shaped us. The trite saying "If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." merely begins to describe it. This so called violation is nothing new. Some people do think about the consequences of the tools they choose. Talk to some amish some time.
I do wonder how the Religous Right will react to this.
Well, I imagine that their most vocal members will be out in full force condemning cloning (as they have been for quite some time now.) I also imagine that the scientific community will politely ignore them, as they should. Dark Ages belief systems and Twentieth Century science can co-exist, but they certainly do not go hand in hand.
On the other hand, I hope that laboratories that take part in cloning experiments have enough foresight to take the proper security precautions. While it is wrong to equate terrorist attacks with the average member of the religious right, it would be dangerously naive to deny that the possibility exists.
Actually, they share the identical genome:
http://www.twinspace.com/
On a lighter note, did god send down a Holy Pooper-Scooper to help clean up all the feces that surely built up on that ark?
Animals in the days before and immediately after the Biblical flood didn't crap in the modern fashion. They excreted rose petals through their belly buttons. This is convenient, because all of those large sauropods and T-Rexes would have made quite a mess indeed. The result was simply a very lovely-smelling Ark.
I LIKE clowns! Bozo, PiPi, all of them! They are funny! Kids love them! Why the hell are you guys so worried about clowns?
I'm religious, and I say clone all you want. I just don't feel that babies should be used as guinea pigs like this, trying to get it to work right.
Who's in the Dark Ages? The ones trying to save countless human guinea pigs from extermination while scientists try to perfect the cloning process, or the ones who see nothing wrong with that.
Y'know, it occurs to me that while the United States may worry about the ethics of cloning humans for spare parts or geneticlly (sp?) engineering superhumans, other nations may not have the same qualms. If we ban such things here, what if other nations which have a not-so-great human rights record, like, oh, say, mainland China (as just ONE example), decide to just damn the torpedos and start creating "body banks" and so on? We seem to be able to pressure smaller countries into doing our will (I.E., Serbia)one way or another but when it comes to big powers. . .
Evil, Evil, Evil, Evil. Are clones human? Are you nothing but bones and flesh, or do you have a soul? Who in hell (that's the answer) wants to be the soul for one of these demonice bastards?
OK. Now that you think I'm the religious right (I'm most definitely not.) This is just one of those things that's definitely more evil than good.
...unless having cow mitochondria is okay. When the sperm and egg fuse in sexual reproduction, you recieve mitochondria from the cytoplasm of both parent cells. Since the egg is huge in proportion to the sperm, you get most of your mitochondria from your mother. This is how some maternally-carried genetic diseases are propagated...mutations in the mitochondrial DNA cause problems in energy metabolism in the offspring.
Would this be a problem if you used cow eggs to make a clone? Who knows? Since cow mitochondria see a different "mix" of digestive products than humans do, it's reasonable to assume that cow mitochondria have evolved to best handle the bovine diet. They might not do so well on the typical human junk food diet. "For some reason, I always feel so GUILTY when I eat a hamburger..."
The solution is to use human eggs instead, of course. Available in really tiny cartons at your local supermarket.
Ignorance of science, and treating science as a religion of sorts (common among secularites who really don't have a strong science background), has the same effect.
Science isn't all "cool and neat". It has a serious dark side that dwarfs religion's by a long shot. If it takes the religious-minded to point this out, then so be it.
Rationalism is a severley constrained way to aproach moral issues, since morality is inherently irrational. Just thought I'd throw that in...
I'm not sure that labeling people that attempt to speak for those that cannot speak or stand up for the oppressed, the weak, and the disabled as having a "Dark Ages belief system" makes much sense...
Maybe I see it that way because my God requires me to protect and value people (not that I always accomplish it-- my human nature is more inclined towards selfishness)-- does that make me a part of the "religous right" and thus to be "politely ignored"? Even if you do think I should be politely ignored, I pray that I will be ready to protect your life and affirm your worth and value in the event someone determines your age, religion, ethnicity, sexual preference, hair color, or whatever says your life is not worth living or that you should be put in a ghetto.
Well, if by that you mean Christianity, cloning in and of itself is neutral.
The murder following it is murder still.
Lampshades, anyone?
Let's look at results....I seem to recall that recently cloned sheep have serious genetic defects that will drastically limit their lifespan. Humans (esp. young adults) are sooooo sure that they have the answers (or that the answers are attainable given only enough time or effort). But effort has very little to do with it and time is not on our side.
I'm not sure what time is supposed to do to whether a proposition is true or false.
Other than be a red-herring to avoid thinking.
I have a problem with making people in order to murder them and cannibalize them for spare parts.
We all did when it was Dr. Mengele and the Nazi's doing it.
It would just be an identical twin. A generation or two apart in age.
>I'm a big believer of "if we can, we should" >science.
That statement is a little dangerous-- so if we can developer a more efficient method raping and torturing people, we should do it because we can do it?
I think not! Clearly Reptyle, your choice of what should and should not be done has a moral basis (your concern for the horrors occurring in Kosovo is evidence of that) so perhaps you should extend your morality to other areas to be consistent. Note, I'm not saying that because you believe horrible things are happening in Kosovo mean that cloning is bad, but that there are good things and bad things and we should not shirk off responsibility for actually confronting the issues that surround us.
Obviously we will need the help of a great leader to 'mark' the clones, so that we know who is REAL and who is SUB-HUMAN. May be those NEW little MicroChip Identifiers. Yea, then we can put them in camps and make sure our SPARE parts are ripe and ready for extraction at our whim. Perhaps we could even use them for testing new products (We have to stop the Animal cruelty!)
Acme Bug Spray - NO ANIMAL TESTING; we use CLONES!
Acme Safe Car - Forget using dummies, we use the closest thing CLONES!! - because nothing matters more than your safety matters to us!!
- Get a grip!
- It's going to happen (most likely Russia / China / Middle East)
- We have to prepair ourselves and stay strong so that we don't have NATURALS vs CLONES. (wouldn't Hitler be proud if we fail)
Well, this is wandering off-topic, but ..
Seriously, imagine if that sort of thing were said about any religion: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. No civilised person says that sort of thing in public (in private, of course, we all keep our own counsel on these things), and yet no-one is afraid to libel Christianity.
I saw a bumper sticker a while back. On the left-hand side of the sticker, there was a cross with the word "BELIEVE" superimposed across it. Okay, fair enough. However, on the right-hand side, the sticker was red, and written in jagged letters were the words "OR SUFFER ETERNAL PAIN!"
Yes, it's true that in America, Christianity is poked, prodded, made fun of, and generally attacked more than any other world religion. But maybe there's a reason for this (not the least of which is the fact that it is the predominant religion here.) The problem with Christianity today (and note that I say Christianity, not Christians) is that its level of discourse has deteriorated severely in recent years. And it isn't just tasteless, blatant threats emblazoned on bumper stickers.
It's television "preachers" lashing out at children's characters because they fear that said characters might be gay, and thus a monsterous polluting force working against America's youth. It's religious fundamentalists who attack and malign scientists because said scientists are publishing things that refute the Biblical literalist claim that the Universe is 6,000 years old. It's daytime callers to talk radio programs who claim that God will "kill us" because we're attacking good ol' Slobo when we should be helping him slaughter the Muslim heathens in Kosovo. (The Oklahoma City tornadoes were, of course, just a taste of the punishment to come.)
And the list goes on and on. I don't know about you, but all of this gives me a bad taste in the back of my mouth.
Now, maybe this isn't fair. In fact, I'm convinced that it isn't. We live in a society where the most wacky and vocal members of a subculture have access to various forms of media, and can make their views known to anybody who happens to be listening/watching/surfing. The long and short of it is that the zealots have managed to portray Christianity in a really unflattering light, even though their views may not even come close to the views of ordinary Christians. If you think about it, this is not a phenomenon that is limited to Christianity; in fact, there is a Linux parallel here! What happens when somebody publishes a biased article that attacks Linux? The advocates come out of the woodwork, often sending childish flames and, in some instances, threats. The result is that Linux users in general are portrayed as rebellious zealots with few social skills, even if the vast majority of Linux users are perfectly well-adjusted folks with normal hormonal balance levels.
And again, this isn't fair. But that's the way I see it. I would submit, however, that if the vocal Christian community communicated their ideas a bit more like you do, there would be far less backlash against Christianity.
JMHO, of course.
Accepting anything on authority is a bad idea. As time goes on, it is getting harder to check how science was practiced in a specific case and what the dry facts actuall are...simply because we're learning more and we as individuals can only know so much. This is a good thing, like having too many customers...though it may not seem like it.
It's not too hard to check religion, though, since I've yet to find one that even attempts to be coherent. Unfortunately, I still bump into people who blindly ignore the obvious facts on how thier religous beliefs are faulty. Check talk.origins on Usenet if you think I'm being too harsh.
Tim Leary said years ago that eventually human reproduction would all be asexual and sex would be used only for communication. This proves that the future he saw is possible.
The religious nuts will probably have a problem with this because it raises questions about the "Soul." Similar questions will be raised when we figure out how to interface our minds with computers. If you back your mind up to backup tape, get yourself killed in a bizarre accident involving a herd of llamas and a pool of hot wax and K-Y Jelly, and then your mind is restored into a clone, what happens to your soul? That sort of thing.
that's why it was funny. If I make a clone for some spare parts, it would only be fair to keep it happy.
Yeah, but imagine when you went to harvest its liver and you found it was knackered from years of alcohol abuse in the Bahamas!
I bred 7 times last night and I feel GREAT!
That's a bit ridiculous, considering that to piss off the gov't good and proper, you need to be at least 10 or so (child prodigies aside), which gives you a ten year minimum head start on the clone. By the time the clone and you look roughly the same age (clone is 35, you're 45), the clone's mind will be entirely different, his experiences will be entirely different, and nobody who has known you for, oh, a week or so will be fooled!
Never mind the 25 years the gov't has to spend raising the little asshole...
Just a flaming
Jurph!
The embryo was "destroyed at 12 days"? How much
more nonchalant can we be? I believe this child was murdered, pure and simple.
Get a life.
Won't be much different than twins already.
Just wondering if we can take old DNA and clone it.. like clone Alexander the Great.. or King Tut... scary
Sung to the tune "I think We're Alone Now". The man was/is a genius and was way ahead of his time.
Damn! I thought they *ARE* all clones!
No, you take the genetic material and stick
it into an egg cell. The egg takes 9 months
to turn into a BABY! You do not get an instant
duplicate of an ADULT!.
If you want to say cloning is complete when
the baby is born, fine. You have a human
being, a nice snuggly tiny infant.
The clone will ALWAYS be N years younger than
the source, where N was the age when cloning
was started (+/- 9 months, not including
freezing embryos).
My point is that if you clone, say, Cameron
Diaz (as someone suggested), you don't get
a screen goddess, you get a baby!
-- cary
I've actually thought about cloning for about ten years before hand.
I've actually done a couple ad hoc surveys on it.
Out of a survey group of ~100 people:
98% didn't want to be cloned.
Out of that group about 57% said cloning was unnatural and against their value system.
It's a pretty shabby survey, but it gives a glimmer of the attitudes the normal Joe thinks about cloning technology. Also, the geek ratio of this group was pretty low. I'd say ~10%.
With all this anti-cloning going on, how widespread is it actually going to be? Are people going to warm-up to it like any other new tech?
As for cloning itself, it is like growing a new human when you don't do any genetic engineering. Whether a embyro is grown in a vat, womb, tube, Kleenex box etc. a scientist does not endow it with a soul. I choose to believe that's where our creator steps in (take you pick as to who that is).
We could make a close carbon copy of anyone if we could control the rate of gestation, rate of cell reproduction, and impress the original's brain neural pathways onto the new brain.
It's all pipe dream science, but with the way technology develops it could happen.
Make a stem cell into an embryo, accelerate growth to the original's age, and establish neural pathways. Pop 'em out of the tube and presto! Another you!
There is one thing which will forever separate a clone from yourself. Relative position. If clones existed, your clone does not occupy the same space as you, nor does he experience anything in the exact same way as you. It's like two TV cameras, unless you occupied the exact same space at the same time. . . well Newton had somehting to say about that.
As for the practical applications of cloning, harvesting any sentient being is a Big Problem.
I have a prediction (you can definitely choose to disagree).
Cloning will eventually occur with us growing a raising new copies. Crimes will be commited against clones in the name of science and religion. Wars will be fought about it. We will reap the benefits, and harvest all the guilt. Clones will be slaughtered, organ mined, descriminated, and exploited as slaves and soldiers for decades until we realize the damage we caused.
Any of this sound familiar?
It's alarmist claptrap with a hint of truth. Everyone who posts on this website has at least an inkling of what good and evil deeds humans are capable of doing.
We call them identical twins (or triplets, etc.) The only difference is that these twins are (1) born farther apart and (2) artificially produced. How does that make them more evil than the natural variety? And how does that make them more 'scary' than people created via artifical insemination (hailed widely as a godsend by infertile couples)?So to summarize:
(1) Artificial insemination (which is still creating people artifically) is pubically accepted.
(2) Identical twins (duplicates of the same person) are also publically accepted.
Combining 1 and 2 stirs ph33r among the public, and the resulting person (one will be born eventually) to be stared at like some sort of freak curiosity.Am I missing something here?
Who says artificial gestation is far behind manufactured people? See details on what some scientist in Japan are doing.
The real burden is upbringing. One infant at a time with progenitors that often have a huge emotional attatchment to them is hard enough.
> The problem is simple. Inbreeding doesn't work...
> For example, you have two families. Each family
> has one boy and one girl. Each boy marries the
> other girl....
Abosulutely does not work this way except for
very small population sizes. Variations creep
back into the genome.
If this were true, even a starting population
of a few billion would last...oh...only about
30-35 generations before being "out of genes".
We've had that many already, which would imply
that we're all inbred.
Well, okay, I do wonder somedays...
They put the "fun" into "fundamentalist dogma"
Last I checked, Christians were fighting to get the right to --be able-- to pray in schools, not to force it on your kids. Do you realize in most schools in America, today, the laws are such that most kids cannot pray if they --want-- to, without being suspended/expelled/prosecuted because it might infringe on someone's something or other? What the heck?
Do some research... Christians just want the same rights that everyone else has. If you have a right to wear a blue shirt or not, I'd like that right, too. If you have the right to mutter some words to your deity, be it one recognized, or that tree outside, in your foreign tongue, or not, I'd like the right to do the same.
Is that asking so much?
I'm sorry that you've had bad experiences with people who called themselves Christians. Jesus said "You'll know my disciples by the love they have" -- if they're not showing His love, then they're not His disciple, according to Him.
I could call myself a martian, but that wouldn't make me one. Nor does going to church make one a Christian any more than going to a garage makes me a car. It's okay to base your decision of Christians on how they act, but consider what I've said before determining who is, and who isn't a Christian before you base your judgements on them.
I don't have a login, so I'm posting this anon.
Feel free to email responses to ascent@rmthisforspam_hotbot.com
-Ascent
Maybe he's thinking along the lines of the Prisoner's Dilemma and such -- e.g. ruthless competition versus cooperation, and how being an utter SOB can get you ahead in certain situations, such as business.
I took a brief look at DrDino.com and I am as usual underwhelmed. I noticed that in very few of the answers there are chapter and verse to defend the writer's allegations. I also noticed that there were quite a few unsubstantiated "I assume...", "Some have suggested...", etc. And then there is this very telling comment:
"Although I do not know exactly how Noah took care of all the animals on the Ark I am going to believe the Bible until it is proven wrong instead of doubt the Bible until it is proven right."
This is typical of the blinding nature of faith. It is assumed right IN SPITE OF evidence, not BECAUSE OF evidence. One could just as easily say "I am going to assume that there are humans living on Jupiter until it is proven wrong." If we thought like this person then we would have to accept every hair-brained idea until someone could "prove" it wrong.
But who cares about proof as long as you have "faith"? I can ask more questions in ten minutes about the Bible and Christianty than any Xtian can answer in a lifetime, yet they will still have "faith" that it is true. Self-deluded liars!
There is little true and nothing scientific about Christianity. God cannot save souls, but I can. I am better and faster and smarter than God.
And yet I survive after such blasphemy! According to that book of myths, the Bible, God has killed for much less than this. At best God looks inconsistent. At worst, nonexistent.
C'mon Xtians, quote some scripture at me!
an EX-Christian
Nothing new here. Same problem as inter-racial breading. We learn and adapt.
And when did a science or technology,
or a person driven by scientific principles,
ever destroy someone's soul? (The doing of
which is apparently the raison d'etre of,
eg, the Catholic church.)
Besides, what's religion's bright side?
Making people comfortable with their sorry
lot in life and more willing to die? Great.
I'll take the invention of the computer
over that any day.
you stated "Can someone explain what is so "scary" about this? I'm not really that frightened -- the "huge ethical questions" raised seem to have simple answers. (Are clones human? Well, yes. Do they have full human rights? Well, yes. Huh. That seems to end the discussion.) "
my reply is "well you need to look further into the subject than the obvious surface to begin to see what all can be scary about it.
do they count as human and deserve full rights as human, i concur the answer is yes... however, the purpose behind the cloning then comes into question.
question: why would they clone more humans when the "natural" formation can be so pleasureable?
answer: they wouldn't.
this is being set up for the exact reason of manipulating these living creatures for the purposes of others. there will be no rights allowed you can be assured of that for if they were allowed to have rights as any other human then there would be no chance of experimentation and there would be no exploitation.
ask yourself... do you really think that the people doing these experiments are just trying to find a new way of making babies? obvious answer: of course not."
Tee
Dinosaurs! Dinosaurs! I want dinosaurs! Hell, I'll take a wooly mammoth or a neanderthal even. Do something amusing and interesting with this.
considering what happened in the 19th and 20th century
(stalin, mao, hitler, amin, pot, and their corporate buddies)
im not so enthusiastic about the 21st. the main
use of fantastic new technology seems to be
either to support dictators or to support corporate
domination of society. its only a matter of time before this tech gets
used to somehow improve profits or make killing easier.
sure some peoples lives are better with this stuff, but alot of people
get left behind in the rush and shuffle.
It might be a good idea to start collecting DNA samples of interesting people for later use. (The practice might be explicitly banned in the future, or people with good DNA might get careful about leaving their DNA out in public.)
So, if you ever have occasion to shake Britney Spear's hand, just swab your palm with some cotton and put it on ice.
Or bag her old chewing gum from the trash.
Or steal the fork that she uses at a restaurant.
>cold "science" of psychiatry/psychanalysis
I'm glad you put "'science'" of psychiatry and
"psychanalysis" [sic] in quotes.
Keep in mind the cloning of the human embryo is
biology, with a little biochemistry thrown in.
Please define how the "materials of life" are
"special". This explanation falls a little short.
>Then look at a skydiver who's dropping like a falling bird, laughing the entire way before deploying his parasail; that's what it means to "live".
Thanks for your definition of "living". Keep in
mind 99.9999999999999999999999% of all life on
earth has no concept of a parasail or laughing, so I guess, by your definition, they aren't "living".
And in addition, even too-short telomeres can be corrected. The enzyme telomerase (which disappears in humans and most other animals after adolesence) can be used to reconstruct the telomere during cell division.
This is all pretty much humans learning how the chemical machinery of our bodies works. It's a necessary evil to have to kill embryos. And really, what's wrong with that? We've established that the thing we call "self" requires a sufficiently complex neural network to run, and that certainly doesn't exist in a single cell.
I entirely agree that cloned human beings should, if created, have the same rights as any other human beings. Assuming a perfect clone (a large assumption, I realize), a clone should be no different than an identical twin.
So what is the relationship between dna doner and clone? Should it be a mother/daughter, father/son type of relationship? What about people who are cloned at a very young age? Should they suddenly become something like a twin? Where does the border lie?
More serious, in my mind, is the possibility of widespread cloning. This could lead to massive inbreeding, and thus weaken the gene pool. Also, it would put the population in danger of rapid epidemic, because if one person was geneticly vulnerable to a certain disease, a large proportion of the population would also be vulnerable because they share the same genes.
Why don't we just clone humans with two asses? One isn't enough for my tastes.
The material of life is the soul. Humans can create biological automatons but cannot infuse it with a soul. It would be no different than a clunky robot. There is more to life than flesh.
Mark McGuire DNA from spit from Jun 12, 1999 - perfetly preserved. Bidding starts at $27,000, no reserve. We also have Liv Tyler, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Heather Graham, Natalie Portman, Bill Clinton, Mel Gibson and hundreds of others top celebs, politicians, sports stars and more. Now available - Audrey Hepburn, Winston Churchill and numerous other recent historical figures (***DNA may be slightly degraded). Call for custom quote!
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Better yet. We can ask him ten minutes of
questions about science and see how many lifetimes it takes to answer.
So....about that whole creation of the universe....
IMHO as a firmly entrenched agnostic, it looks like there's as much handwaving in science as there is in religion in the areas of universe creation/souls/etc.
It was in an Asimov Sci Fi magazine, and I belive the name of it was Lethe, and it took place in the future, and nobody really "died". You see, they discovered that brain memories were stored in certain chemical patterns, and they had nano-bots which were able to take a human apart, molecule by molecule, and store exactly how it was to be put back together. Essentially people would 'back' themselves up, and if they dies, someone would just get the nano-bots to put a bunch of molecules together in the exact same way that your body was originally. This would case you to have the exact memories that you did at the time of backup. One application they talked about using was a starship was about to be destroyed so the crew went to the nano-beds and backed themselves up and beamed the data back to earth and we reconstructed there. Interesting premise. They were able to get the nano-bots to keep fine tuning their body to contradict the natural aging process as well. It was a pretty good story, though I'm just talking about the technology used behind it.
I don't believe that 20% loss of telomere length is only "a little bit shorter." Also, your argument ignores other cited possible side effects, including an increased risk of cancer.
Nice touch, that last comment.
Let us assume that a clone is being created for a adult patient who has lost a leg. How long until that leg is ready to transplant?
Clones don't just magically mature (ripen ?) to the desired age. With current cloning technology, the cloned body(part) must age at the same rate as a natural human. That means that the leg the patient needs will be ready after the clone has finished maturing (finished adolesence) in approximately 15-18 years. The patient can't wait that long to get a new leg.
Internal organs can probably be harvested sooner than structural body parts, so cloning is probably better suited for this purpose.
Without further technology developments to handle the rapidity of development (and to stop the accelerated development once transplanted), I see no way that cloned external body parts will be useful in the near future.
Since when did we "establish" that the thing we call self requires xxxx? Scientific inquiry is a process, not a termination point.
And since when is the sense of "self" the criteria for what lives or dies? That type of thinking leads to mandatory termination of life support systems in hospitals (and abortion).
you don' need the WHOLE brain to live, just part of it. If all you are going to do is forse-grow a body, what does it need for cognative function, the ability to interperate senceory information, or anything else not directly involved with maintaining homestasis. Effectively, you only NEED the medula and brain stem, not much else.
Ciennabarq
Okay, so you find a volunteer. I'm sure someone will provide the first womb for the task. Just make sure you clone a female, and voila! Now you use that clone to make others.
I agree completely with this poster. I don't understand why so many people get freaked out by the concept of cloning. Why is this any big deal (much less ethically wrong)? Has the general public just seen too many bad movies?
I took a quick peek, and while I wasn't expecting much, I have to say that I've seen much better. I think that the single most formidable problem facing young-Earth creationists is the fact that we can see objects in space that are far beyond the 6,000-year "creation horizon." After all, if it cannot be shown that the universe is only 6,000 years old, then all of their complaints about carbon dating and other such methods become moot. Naturally, www.drdino.com attempts to resolve this issue in three ways.
.. it has the appearance of history! One might wonder why Adam was not created with a tattoo, an appendectomy scar and a family album! A God who would project a "picture show" of a supernova on the 6,000 year "creation horizon" to trick us into thinking it happened 170,000 years ago seems to be a deceitful entity indeed. The logical end to this argument is a school of thought called "Last Thursdayism", which states that God created the entire universe last Thursday .. we were put here with all of our "memories" intact, even though none of these things ever actually happened. This is precisely equivalent to the "starlight in transit" school of thought, and is just as silly.
First, it states that the methods used to measure intergalactic distances in space are not accurate. This is true. For close stars, direct trigonometric calculation based on stellar parallax gives very accurate results, but direct measurement is not possible for very distant objects (i.e., galaxies and QSOs.) Still, it doesn't really matter. If our calculations were off by a factor of ten, or a hundred, or a hundred thousand, these great distances still wouldn't fit into the scheme of a six thousand year-old universe. So the first attempt is nothing more than a strawman.
The second attempt is the classic "tired light" theory; that is, the speed of light is decaying over time. (Some creationists claim that the speed of light was infinite before the Fall in the Garden of Eden, and that God is slowing it down as a punishment for man's fall from grace.) This argument has been conclusively refuted by scientists (some of them creationists themselves), and yet it continues to this day. Its sponsors are apparently not bothered by the fact that the speed of light has not changed during the time in which we have been able to measure it.
The third and final attempt is the most ridiculous. All that distant starlight was created in transit, they say; when God created the universe, the light between the objects and the Earth was also created. In other words, the universe was created with the appearance of age. But it goes much further than that. The appearance of Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud poses some tough questions for these creationists. If the universe is only 6,000 years old, then why did we see light from a supernova that happened 170,000 years ago?
The problem for the creationists is that the universe does not have the appearance of age
Yet it never fails to amaze me how many Christians are perfectly willing to worship a deceitful God who (they claim) will send them to hell for using the brains, curiosity, and creativity that they were given, all so that they can claim that the Bible is completely inerrant!
In the end, people can worship whomever and whatever they want. As a non-practicing Christian, I'm perfectly happy believing in a God who looks down on us, watching as we figure out the universe around us using the skills that we were given. If He's up there watching us, I imagine he's got a kind of goofy grin on his face, feeling the same kind of pride that a parent feels at their child's high school graduation. Because we are figuring things out, and we are using our best talents. And I for one think that that's what we're supposed to do.
How horrid to have to worry that you were the only you in the world.
Why is this horrid? Do you think most identical twins are bothered that they have such a twin? And how certain are you that you don't have an identical twin wandering around somewhere anyway? You only have your Parent's word on that one...
F=ma works adaquately (adaquately being defined as the error in the the calculation is less than the error in the measurements) for all macroscopic objects (macroscopic meaning things bigger than an atom) at low speed (low speeds in this case being less 3/4ths the speed of light which is approximately a measly 2.25*10^8 meters per second). Objects smaller than this are significantly effected by additional forses and faster than this there are significant effects from reletivistic effects.
So, the point of this is that scientists KNOW that F=ma is wrong, but they also know how its wrong and how to conpensate when nessisary for most of those situations. Religion claims absolute truth, scientists (at least the good scientists) only claim to do the best they can.
Ciennabarq
.. if we actually cloned somebody and let the clone be born, we should expect it to do nothing more than wander around aimlessly and mutter "Danger, Will Robinson" and "Would you like fries with that?"
What do you mean they didn't consider whether or not they should? In the article, they mention the fact that the reason they were destroyed at 12 days was the fact that thier moral desesion was that anything they made could not be considered human untill after 14 days (for reasons which I will not bother to repeat). Not only was the moral aspect considered, it was an important part of the experiments.
Also, they mention clearly that they do not intend to clone entire humans. How they intend to create replacement parts without a host body is beyond my area of knowledge, but I can think of a few things where you don't need a body at all. Replacement skin, for instance. I can't give you a link or even remember where I read this (somebody please find one for me), but as I recal they are now able to grow many types of tissue, such as skin, without a body. This has huge implications for the treatment of burn victoms, who might not be abe to spare any skin to be grafted elsewhere, or even enough to start the culture to grow the additional skin for later grafts in an artificial envirionment. And thats just what I could think of off the top of my head!
Ciennabarq
So if clones don't have souls, then they arn't alive, therfore its not murder to slaughter them indescriminantly? And its not slavery to forse them into a not-life of servitude? And its not rape to use them for sexual acts? We can just break them with the same good moral standing as we would a stick. I like this idea, that means I'll be in the elite of the New Society built on the labor and parts of soulless, not-living clones! Or is the soul theory just plain stupid?
btw, ever consider that in the same way that people who are born the "normal way" have souls, (assuming that they exist) might not people who are cloned get a soul from the mystical place that souls come from? Just a thought.
Ciennabarq
Absolutist claims are characteristic of all religions -- including evolutionism.
I'm a Christian who believes in evolution. What does that make me?
My life might be a computer simulation. I wonder if I have any identical clones that read ./ also!
My life might be a computer simulation; I wonder if I have any identical clones that read ./ also!
At last! We finally know where lawyers come from!
The Osmond Family?
But then you'd also have to pay for all the silicone enhancements...
A troll, a syncretist, and/or just plain wrong.
It must be disconcerting for you to realize that there are plenty of trolls, syncretists, and wrong people out there. Theistic evolutionists are not exactly an endangered species.
The two are absolutely incompatible. Period.
Only in your fundamentalist mind.
I am not even remotely troubled by the fact that some, few, or many people believe in something as grotesquely wrong as theistic evolution -- with the single exception of being concerned for their souls.
:-)
:-) Look, this won't get us anywhere. We have about the same chances of changing each others minds as Pauly Shore has of winning the next round of "Celebrity Jeopardy." So I think I'll leave it at that.
While I appreciate the concern, it is not you that will decide what happens to my soul, so let's move on, hmm?
Unless you'd like to demonstrate that Genesis 1 "can" be harmonized with evolution?
If Genesis 1 is taken metaphorically, as a guide given to a simpler people in a simpler time who had the same complex questions we have today, it only makes sense to "harmonize" it with the observations that we have in hand. I do not anticipate that you will accept this. However, I also do not believe in a deceitful God. Theistic evolution is acceptable to everybody from the guy in the office next to me all the way up to the Pope. If it isn't acceptable to you, then that's fine, although I must say that I do resent any negative conclusions you may have reached about my convictions.
I won't hold my breath waiting.
Nor will I waste mine!
I cloned myself a few years ago. It was, of course all kept secret, but I'm
sure I'm not the only one that has done this. The world is a very large place,
with many secrets. What the public knows is usually a few years behind
reality, but since this is all common place now I feel I can tell my story in
brief.
It was a new technology at the time. Not even a technology, but many combined
theories, with many, many failures. It was my project, my money, my employees,
but I didn't distance myself from any of it. Work, sleep. Trial, error. But
finally came success. A cloned embryo, with hyper-telemeres. We all know
how this works by now..
I planned to raise my new son to be better than the rest. Who knows my faults
better than I? Who knows my strengths, and how to best develop them better
than I? And my faults and strengths were his faults and strengths. No current
life form would be able to compete.
Maybe that sounds a little maniacal. You hear that a lot in movies about
people just trying to be a part of the progression of humanity. I've thought a
lot about this, and I really think I am as human and as frail as the next guy.
But this is science. It isn't going away. Since I have the means to be apart
of it I must do so, or be left behind.
He was born, a wonderful child, human in every way. There are so many strange
people out there who think that a clone is some how different from the rest of
us! He was beautiful, and the bond that I felt existed between us was stronger
than any that a normal parent could ever feel. I was sure of it.
I wanted the best of the average life along side the best I could offer my son.
I took him grocery shopping once and we watched the other kids with their
parents. The average kid, with his average problems. The kid would usually be
riding in the grocery cart, crying or whining, usually in the cereal isle,
demanding a more colorful, popular box of cereal with a better prize in it.
That kid doesn't have a chance.
I didn't take my boy out of the house much after that. I spend most of my time
at home now. No reason to expose my son to such a petty style of life. It has
been done. It is time to move on. I'm not building a machine, a cold, callous
human planning world domination. Leave that to the story tellers who fear
change. I just can't believe that humanity has made it this far but still
worries about such trivial things.
A simple, normal household. I put up some wallpaper featuring the great
mathematical formulas. Math remains the true universal language.
I bought one of those black-and-white stimulation-mobiles to hang above his
crib. And, of course, always play music (usually Mozart) in the background.
He's doing great.
Opportunity is all I want. Nothing more. Just opportunity.
I am expecting my next son in three months.
Just thought I'd point out that people have been producing headless mice and frogs and other animals for years. Causing something to grow with no brain, or at least only those parts it needs to breathe and keep up a heartbeat isn't all that far beyond what can be done right now.
I think you have a cheese penis.
I know identical twins which have very different personalities. For a clone to have the same personality, it must have the exact same experiences as the original person. Or something like that.
Also, can you imagine the lawsuits here? Alyssa Milano was a little pissed off about websites selling pictures of her... imagine what would happen if they started selling the real thing? And I bet you laughed at www.realdoll.com...
How exactly are believing in evolution and believing in God mutually exclusive? Or do you consider it the case that if someone doesn't believe exactly the same things about God as you then they don't truly believe? ... that's not the point"), but why not, it illustrates what I want to say. The teachings of Jesus as shown in the bible are heavy on metaphor, and yet you try to claim that everything in the Bible has to be literal truth?
I mean, for crying out loud, evolutionary methods are perfectly good bottom up design techniques. Or is it the whole earth created in six days thing? Oh yeah, and the calculations based on the bible that show the Earth to be somewhere between four and eight thousand or what have you? Why do they have to be six consecutive days? Since God is not constrained by concepts like time, who says they're even chronologically in the order the bible puts them? What if, horror of horrors, something in the bible wasn't literally true, but figurative instead? Not possible? What's a parable then? I'm obviously thinking of Monty Python's Life Of Brian now ("There was a man, and he had two servants..." "What were their names?" "What, I don't know
I'm not just a Christian, I am a Catholic. I was never taught to believe things just because I'm supposed to. If you have never doubted or had your faith truly tested, I believe your faith is flawed.
People's beliefs and religions are their own, however. You have to learn to respect that. You are not better than the next person because you are a Christian. You are not better than the next person because you are agnostic or atheist. You are a human living among humans. There is no ultimate divine scale against which you measure your value system. You chose a lifestyle and naturally will defend it as the best. Learn to respect others and try not to deride their personal beliefs. Don't worry about it unless they're trying to push their beliefs onto you. Then it's time to give them hell.
On to my point. God gave us brains so that we would use them. Science is valueless. Knowledge is valueless. It's the practice and application of these things that is either good or bad. Question everything. Think it out for yourself. Don't make a comment on something you know nothing about. I've seen my share of ignorant religious people deriding science and ignorant scientists deriding religion.
Ignorance is our common enemy.
Metaphors are metaphors. Try to imagine how you would explain an internal combustion engine to a bunch of cavemen. Would you explain it in your own terms, which they could not hope to understand, or in their terms, which wouldn't give them an accurate picture at all, but would at least give them some idea.
Also, you seem to be greatly confused about the scope of the theory of evolution. It's not about the creation of the universe, just the origins of life.
One of the classic Creationist arguments against evolution that I've heard is about spontaneous generation. Many Creationists are not prepared to accept that single celled life could simply spring forth where no life had existed before. At the same time, they are prepared to accept that fully formed human beings sprang forth where none had existed before. Anyone see a problem with this? Am I to understand that God can make a whole human being, but not a simple microbe?
That's one of my big problems with Creationist arguments; most of them are about placing limits on God's power. According to the Creationists, God is constrained by time, causality, and workload. His actions and behaviour are so simple that they can be penned down on paper and stuck in a relatively short and completely accurate book.
Also, maybe you're right that God doesn't lie. But, if you believe that God never tests people, or allows people to believe things that aren't true, I really have to wonder which bible you've been reading. Either that, or I have wonder what exotic substances you've been indulging in.
Assumptions:
-God exists
-It is necessary to have a soul to really live.
-To have a soul, one needs to have been conceived naturally.
Implications:
-Artificial insemination creates soulless people.
-Cloning creates soulless people.
-God deprives the innocent child of a full life by not granting it a soul.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to believe in a God that deprived the innocent child of a full life.
You know, religious leaders. Just men, as you say. Why should they be any less fallible? If you're going to claim that God arranged matters so that the writers of the bible got everything correct, why are translators of the bible allowed to get things wrong? Whatever religious denomination you're a part of, you must have an approved version of the bible, and a list of translations that are not approved.
First, several ways of dealing with the sun created after plants thing.
1. The plants were prototypes. Evolution may have resulted in the development of plants, but a supreme being is exempt from having to worry about causality. Spending a billion years getting plants put together from microbes could be God's version of making a ship in a bottle.
2. See the causality explanation. God might have gotten some great inspirations for kiwifruit and jumped the gun on creating plants. He got around to the sun later when he'd decided where to put the sunspots. Obviously he had to send the sun back in time when he was done with it.
3. How do you have a day without a sun, anyway? A day is the length of time it takes the sun to appear to circle the Earth. Saying that there were days before there was a sun sounds like one of those circular arguments you accuse those hateful evolutionists of.
4. Maybe what it says in the bible isn't the absolute, literal truth. Maybe it's metaphorical. Maybe it's not metaphorical, but lots of the actual engineering details, like waiting millions of years for the continents to set are left out. Maybe the seven days are just the days on which God acted directly. Maybe the bible was just written by men who got things wrong.
As for making humans out of dust... What exactly do you think dust is, anyway? Have you ever even looked closely at dust? Do you know that most of the dust in your home is probably dead skin? Did you know that a lot of it is teaming with microbes and bacteria?
But, you'll believe what you believe. Fair enough I suppose.
The way the layers can be twisted and bent and rippled and skewed. The way 50 layers can settle on a given layer before it even starts to turn from mud to rock. Have you ever seen the fossils of clam tunnels? Thin sticklike calcite deposits that burrow down through thousands of years worth of deposited material.
You're right about radio-carbon dating not giving correct results for living animals. I know you didn't say it in this post, but I can see that you've read the Creationist Faq, which has some ridiculous stuff about radiocarbon dating of living snails. For one thing, radiocarbon dating fixes the time that a living thing died, so using it on living things is pretty stupid. For another, weren't those sea snails, as in not exposed to earths atmosphere, which is what we know the carbon 14 content of. For yet another, carbon dating isn't exactly as precise as your stopwatch, everyone knows this. For one more thing, ever since all those open air nuclear explosions we've had this century, most forms of isotope dating have been completely messed up for anything that wasn't already dead when the nukes went off.
How about that grand canyon thing. I don't know what you're talking about when you talk about the Colorado river flowing uphill. In any case, I've heard of a river that flows uphill for a short distance although it's not actually steep enough for you to even notice. In any case, you may have heard of a little thing called uplifting. You don't have to believe that the earth is billions of years old, people who have been through major earthquakes can describe it to you. Point is, ground level changes.
Great flood caused all the sedimentary layers and rock formation? Have you ever even made the slightest effort to look at rocks? You can see how they formed. You can see where they formed. What about varves? Seasonal glacial deposits that you can watch being deposited in lakes. Dig into the beds of lakes fed by glaciers and you can find thousands (more than six) of years worth of them. What about the seasonal layers in artic and antartic ice? For crying out loud, take a geology course. If you can find explanations in the bible for all this stuff that you can observe in your own back yard, I'd like to hear it.
Wow! Alzheimer's in a 20 year old body! What a blast!!
Ummmm...
You forget to think about the LOGISTICS of what you are predicting. It will be at least 100 years before this kind of capability will be remotely feasible. The costs of feeding and caring for a human are enormous. Also, the cost of creating a clone is enourmous.
Even after that, there will still be about 10 billion real humans to contend with.
That indicates to me that you are open minded.
:) (but a good person in general)
While not catholic myself, I attended catholic school, and evolution was taught seamlessly with the catholic viewpoint.
I, for one, take everything with a grain of salt, something I guess is afforded by being an atheist
-no cookies here, btyler@ece.utexas.edu
I do think it'd be a wonderful achievment if we could somehow grow organs for transplants. However, I think it would be very difficult to grow/clone organs without the rest of the body, since all parts are in someway dependant upon the others.
Simple. Grow the new organ inside your own body!
Say you need a new kidney for some reason. Now let the scientists extract a cell and do whatever necessary for starting a new kidney from it. The cell will grow into a lump of cells that will become a kidney after som months. After a while, this lump of cells is big enough to need a blood supply. Just implant it in your body then, and have it grow to full size there.
Much cheaper than growing an entire brainless body, and none of the ethical problems either.
How can you sin when you have not been conscious, and therefore have no free will. 12... ding, ding. Wrong.
That also assumes parents are unbelievers. They could be devout christians, who commited a sin.
Your god's justice comes into question at the idea of sending a soul to torment because of the sins and actions of another.
how do you define "Creating a plant".
Must you create the plant itself?
Can you create a seed in fertile soil, knowing that it will grow?
Can you create single-celled plants, knowing that they will develop into something more?
Similarly, what kind of "creation" is allowed to turn dust into people? Seems rather presumptuous to think that God must have done it the way you seem to interpret it: i.e. dust one instant, man the next.
Did I miss some footnote in Genesis that describes the whole process?
God presented a vision, man wrote Genesis. No possible way to cram the entirety of creation into a human mind, so we have to live with the short version.
People are absoulely able to believe what they want, and interpret the Bible the way the want (or to ignore it completely, should they choose). That is what free will is all about (Garden of Eden, remember?). It is most definitely not YOUR place to judge them.
You seem to be equating "wrong to do so" with "incapable of doing so". Why?
God most definitely allows people to not believe in him. This should be obvious given the number of atheists in the world.
Your position seems somewhat strange, even for a defense of religion. People may believe whatever they choose. The consequences of this are, frankly, not determined by you in any way.
Ok, please explain the significant differences between "allowing" something and "tolerating" something. In other words, it seems to me that you repeated exactly what I said. People are free to believe whatever they want. God may punish them later. Whether or not they get punished is not even remotely dependent on whether YOU agree with them. In other words, you have no guarantee that your interpretation of the bible (and it IS an interpretation) is correct. There are other interpretations that are equally valid. Differences in manuscripts alone should make this obvious. No loving God could be petty enough to condemn a soul who wanted to worship, but happened to choose a bad translation of the bible to base their beliefs on.
Okay, this conversation has long since passed the point of rationality (most would say it started beyond this point), so this will be my last post.
Do you even attempt to think before you write? Certainly not any interpretation of a text is correct, and descending into irrational statements like this will not help your argument (although I realize you don't think it needs help). The Bible was written using a human language, and human languages are not nearly as precise as you seem to think they are. Therefore, since:
1) You aren't God
2) You aren't any of the authors of the Bible
3) human words can have different shades of meaning (or different meanings altogether)
you can't possibly know completely and exactly what was intended. Now, I'm sure you'll probably argue with #3 (I certainly hope we can agree on #1 and #2!). Suffice to say that you'll never change my mind on this.
If you disagree, reread our last few postings. Claiming that you "can disobey God...[but]...God will judge you" is exactly what my original statement was, yet somehow you have pulled an entirely different meaning out of it. Despite this massive "alternate interpretation" of what I wrote, I'll bet that you will continue to argue that Bible text is completely clear.
It isn't. You'll never convince me it is. I think that the major doctrinal points come across, but there are lots of words in the Bible, lots of fuzzy meanings. If you still don't believe me, flip to your creationism/evolutionism thread. Explain, completely and exactly, what it means to "create man from dust". And then go back and try again, because I'll bet that none of the 27000 manuscripts in existence talk about the actual process, and "to create" something is covering an awful lot of possible ground, even if you're writing in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or anything else. And this is just one of the simple problems with interpreting ancient texts!
I feel sorry for you,locked into such a narrow view of things. I think you're missing out on the wondrous possibilities that the Bible allows for (as opposed to the wondrous "certainties" that you seem to think that you have). But that's my viewpoint, of course, based on my own readings and study (and I've done more than a little). I certainly don't think God is going to condemn me for it.
Imagine how fun it would be to purchase 2 or 3 copies of Cameron Diaz... Immature I know, but it's a compelling thought.
I'm getting sick of this.
Look, if you successfully clone an adult human, then
in 9 months you get an itty bitty baby that
has the same genetic material as the source.
(Well, there are questions about the telomeres).
You do *NOT*, repeat *NOT* get a duplicate
creature the same age as the source! Why
do people continue to think that cloning works
like some bizzare star trek transporter
accident where you get an identical human
the same age as the source.
IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY!
-- cary
I have no problems with clones, probably due to me being a twin. But I do have a problem with the idea that clones are not different people, or that a clone can be treated as a commodity. ;)
Twins/clones are different people even if they look similar. My experience being a twin and with the several others that I know is that the always have different personalities. You can tell which twin is which quit easily. I have never met two that communicate in quite the same way, they usually have different body language and a different vocabulary. Just because you have the same DNA, dosn't meen you are the same. Don't treat us as the same person! (and you thought you had an identity problem
Now a clone as a commodity... Now as a natural clone I have just one question. Is it me or my twin, who is the spare parts?
Sorry about this rant, but..
This is something I've been thinking about for quite a while. The Bible says that God created man. It does not say how. To my knowledge, there is nothing in the Bible that says God did not create man through evolution.
;)
It does say man was created on the sixth day and that could be looked upon as ruling out evolution. But a day is a relative measure of time. It's probably not even meant to be taken literally, being more of a symbolic amount of time. God gave humans 1/7 of the amount of time he took to create everything. Ironically, that's also the amount of time he rested
hmm.. Quite a good refute. I'll have to think about it some more.
I do belive that taking something too literally can be just as bad as not believing it at all. For instance, this created from the dust of the earth thing could be just that we are created of the substance of the earth, not literally the dust. I dunno. Maybe I'm just looking for a way to prove something I believe. You know, you have a way to disprove my theories using something taken as fact, but I have no equally strong way to disprove anything in the Bible. Not that I'd want to, just something to think about.
You piss off the gov't.
They "make" a clone of you.
Bye Bye.
Perfect for those pesky crypto-anarchists and others.
just an idea. . .
---
This is much more important to those scenarios than cloning, because if you do can gestate (and raise) the kids without an opportunity for anyone to have an emotional attachment to them, then it will be dangerously practical to raise slaves, and it won't matter whether they're clones or not.
You can if their religion is the cause of their ignorance. Religion has a way of brainwashing people who get too caught up in it. Not that there's anything wrong with that..
Seriously though, it makes me wonder where technology will be 10 years from now.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Clones are just identical twins who were born a little farther apart than normal twins. No big deal.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
"the resultant offspring will be as unique an individual as anyone else."
Wrong. The clone would be as unique as an identical twin. That's fairly unique, but not as unique as two randomly chosen people.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Clearly they are discrete individuals who can make their own decisions. But it is not clear to what extent their genome influences things like thoughts (or modes of thinking), ambitions and desires.
You should check out some studies on identical twins. Pretty weird stuff.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Posted by aPhysch:
Why should the scientific community ignore those who believe in a type of Christian morality? Is it because science is somehow "above moral questioning?" I seriously hope that you don't believe this crap.
If you do, go read a book about the creation of nuclear weapons during WWII, and also read some things on a guy named Norbert Wiener. His "The Human Use of Human Beings" may be applicable. Then perhaps you'll understand that science is not above ethical questions.
And for those that say that because we have the theoretical knowledge of _HOW_ to do something that we must _necessarily_ do that.... grow up a little. Actions like the cloning of humans should NOT be done behind closed doors, and then revealed in a "too late" manner. Instead, there should be long and thoughtful discussions on these issues. Of course, some might say that the average Joe could not understand the implications of cloning in any real sense, and in their ignorance they will not want such a thing to occur. To them, I state that the scientific community then has it in their best interests to attempt to educate these "poor slobs." Then, perhaps the majority will agree with them, and these moral question would all but vade.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
"Discrete" and "distinct" are nearly synonymous.
Maybe you are thinking of "discreet"?
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
I am *more* than a sequence of amino acids. So are you. The creation of a unique (or nearly unique strand of DNA) is not the creation of "me." What makes me unique sis that I think, I have (as the bible put it) the knowledge of good and evil, and the ability to choose between the two. That isn't the case for a newly fertilized egg!
Biblicly speaking, human life is "defined" by having a soul. We have no "soulscope" to detect souls. However, we do have a reasonable scientific alternative; yes, brainwaves. The right brainwaves mean we are thinking, we are making those choices. And we don't consider a person to be a different person if they have a heart, or a kidney, or a lung replaced (by a transplant or artificial organ.) We don't consider someone dead if their heart can't beat on its own. We do consider someone dead if there's no evidence of brain activity. A just-conceived egg doesn't have brain activity. So why not be logically consistent and take the evidence of brain activity to be the start of life? *That's* what logic dictates.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Two genetically identical persons growing up different wouldn't be proof of the presense or lack of a soul or a higher
power or purpose. There are many environmental factors that are at least as important as genetics, such as how you
were brought up, how you've been treated, your economic well being etc.
And what about identical twins? Same genetics, same environment, and they still end up with different personalities.
Personally, I think that identical twins are very strong evidence that there is more to a person than genetics and environment.
I also happen to think that a cloned embryo is just as human as a naturally conceived embryo, and to abort either is equally unjust.
I guess that makes me a religious wacko. So be it.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Would it still be a human if you just clone the body, but not the brain? Which part of your body makes you human? I don't know if I buy any of this stuff. We are made of the same stuff as everything else on this planet. We get hurt sometimes or are born with bad defects. Why shouldn't we be able to put together some replacement parts for ourselves?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
How is morality inherently irrational? Perhaps some of our morals are, but I wouldn't say that morality in general is irrational.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
That sheep wouldn't have had a lifespan at all if it hadn't been cloned. How many experiments are perfect from the start? It may take some time, but I think they will figure out where the problems are and fix them. They've done all kinds of things that nobody thought possible. Why not this too?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that unless everyone made a clone of just a few people, there would be no problem of inbreeding. As long as you make a clone of yourself, it shouldn't be a problem(although I wouldn't want a clone of myself that I would actually raise, I'd want one w/o a brain that I could just use for spare parts, but I doubt they'll be able to do that any time soon.)
"And what about identical twins? Same genetics, same environment, and they still end up with different personalities."
No, they have different names, one was born first, they will probably sleep in different rooms, one will probably be favored by the parents, etc. The only way to test your hypothesis, IMO, would be to make a computer simulation that ran exactly the same every time, and put two people w/ identical DNA in it from before birth. Meaning, they are born into the simulation and have no different outside influences before the simulation begins. Doing that would be horribly wrong though, so maybe we'll never be sure.
heh
I want to hear this
Seems ridiculous to me to. How "just" of God to send an unborn child to eteranal suffering when he/she had no choice.
I also think it's BS that Adam is our "representative". What? I didn't ask for that. Who is Adam to represent billion of people for millenia.
And I also don't understand why God couldn't have just said thing in the Bible that nobody back then would have had any clue of. How about: "The earth is round and goes around the sun and is not the center of the universe". If it said that, I'd be much more convinced. Right now it doesn't seem like anything in the Bible is definitely or even probably God's word, or anything that couldn't have very easily have been made up by people who were delusional or stupid or trying a power grab or anything. Why is the Bible any more or less true than many other religous texts or than something I could type up right now?
"This is a fundamental error committed by many people (including, it seems, you): that they have the right to judge whether the Bible is God's Word, and whether it's true.
You don't have such a right. You are obligated to submit to it."
Even assuming that I would take something on faith and not question it at all, how am I supposed to know who to believe. There are probably at least hundreds of different groups of people who claim to know God's word. Why should I believe Christians? If I don't question what's in the Bible, what right do I have to question what's in the Koran or the teachings of Buddha or anything? If you don't even ask yourself how reasonable the word of God is, how could you possibly know that the Bible is the word of God?
On the other hand, every cell nucleus in my body has the chance to become a person as well, if only someone will kindly stick it in a cow ovum and give it it's chance.
After all, that's how they created that embryo.
Send them to the island of misfit toys.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Just because it's technically possible to destroy an entire city with one atom bomb, doesn't make it morally or ethically "right". Or inevitable.
.
Michael Chriton said it best in Jurrasic Park; the scientist spent so much time trying to figure out if they COULD do it, they didn't think about whether they SHOULD. .
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
And we all know that mitochondria are really midichlorians, so if this cow was strong with the force, so will the cloned offspring, no matter what genetic material it had.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
#5 would be sick with you, but hey, I'm pretty good-looking!
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
NO
ObiWan fought WITH Luke's father in the clone wars, as in, on the same side.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
come on - PEOPLE did these things. How can you blame a god you don't even believe in? Millions of people were killed by - people.
." - so you can't blame God for things man does. Unless you don't believe in free-will, in which case, it really makes no sense to believe in God either.
If religion made it more convenient to explain why entire villages had to be "put to the sword", then wow, what a convenient tool. Almost as convenient as "weapons of mass destruction".
The first three words God says to mankind in the book of Genesis are "You are free. .
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
damn.
If I was born without hands, I sure as hell WOULD want my genetic code changed.
If they could fix my nearsightedness, I sure as hell would want my genetic code changed.
If they could fix my back problems (or prevent my offspring from having them), I sure as hell would want my genetic code changed.
Why the hell would I want to pass on suffering to my offspring? A couple of alterations here and there wouldn't hurt - but going much farther, to the point where I and my offspring wouldn't be similar any longer, genetically speaking, I'd kind of shy away from that.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
And for the one or two rich, self centered bastards out there who will have themselves cloned, really, :>
I couldn't _think_ of a better punishment than for them to have a child who is exactly like _them_
and for the rich folks who do this, will also be able to afford a nanny to raise the little brats for them as well.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
(playing DA here)
That "necessary evil", killing an embryo - perhaps the genetic material used was from the GENIUS who developed this cloning experiment in the first place. Perhaps that embryo would have developed into a pretty smart guy too. Perhaps that embryo would have cured cancer, or solved the CIA crypto-sculpture or something.
But now we'll never know.
Did that embryo have a soul?
Da Pope says yes.
Da Darwin says no.
Da ME says I don't fuggin' know, so what right do I have to decide?
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
--
--
--
Two genetically identical persons growing up different wouldn't be proof of the presense or lack of a soul or a higher power or purpose. There are many environmental factors that are at least as important as genetics, such as how you were brought up, how you've been treated, your economic well being etc.
Even if every gene in a person and its clone were identical the personalities would be quite different if for instance clones weren't given equal protection by the law: You're just a clone, you can't vote, can't own property and oh yeah, if I ever need a liver, kidney, heart or eyes you're just a convenient sack for holding replacement parts.
I was recently visiting some friends in Virginia. They have a daughter who is attending a public school. When I ask her what she had done in school the day before I was shocked at the answer.
Apparently, once a month, they do 'bible study', in class, during school hours.
She was one of the few students who didn't participate, and there was no curiculum planned for the students who were not involved in 'bible study'. Those children were told they could just sit around and draw or whatever that day.
Before birth, a fetus is a parasite, feeding off of it's mother.
After birth it's a small, helpless, hopelessly dependant human.
That gets the timing question down to the cutting of the imbilicus.
So, everyone wondered what religious people might think about this, and while I certainly can't speak for all of them, I'll speak for myself. I find this intensely frightening.
The problem is that this is another in a growing line of medical-ethical questions whose biggest problem is the "at what cost" factor. No one would argue that using this technology to grow tissues for a burn victim from his own skin, or any miriad of similar situations. The part that is of concern is the abuse of the technology.
Some situations: We all remember the frogs with no central nervous systems? Human organs on demand when combined with this technology, and don't tell me you don't think someone will try. Labor pool too small? Human workers on demand. Combined with some fancy genetics, human workers that won't mind being abused as slaves. I suppose some of you have read A Brave New World, so the notion of humans grown by the government isn't really new.
I don't fear new technology, but I do fear the misuse of it. I fear the degradation of human beings grown in labs, and I fear the abuse of life itself for the benefit of a certain few.
Andrew Gardner
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
I would expect many Christians to be active in the "clone rights" movement in the same way that they were and are active in the antislavery, civil rights and pro-life movements. (In the eyes of these people, those three movements are very closely related.) Obviously there are going to be some wackos who call for exterminating clones, just the way they call for exterminating other races, but those people can hardly be called Christian.
Replacing "abortion" with "genocide" in your justification for legalized abortion makes that justification sound silly:
"I'd rather have a trained and qualified doctor performing the genocide, than some [incompetant who is prone to failure and/or self-injury]."
If genocide is wrong (as I believe) then wishing for legalized genocide in order to protect the lives of the people who want to commit genocide is ridiculous. Allowing for safe genocide is not better than allowing for unsafe genocide. Likewise, the rightness or wrongness of abortion is independent from its implementation. It is silly to say that regardless of whether abortion is right or wrong, safe abortions are better than unsafe abortions.
The same is true of drugs. If (some types of) drug use is wrong, legalizing and institutionalizing it doesn't make it better. The question of its rightness or wrongness must be considered independently of its implementation.
Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y-chromosome changed to X
And after it's grown
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.
(Chorus)
Clone, clone of my own,
With your Y-Chromosome changed to X
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex.
Oh, give me a clone
Is my sorrowful moan
A clone that is wholly my own.
And if she's X-X
And the feminine sex
Oh, what fun we will have when we're prone.
My heart's not of stone,
As I've frequently shown
When alone with my own little X
And after we've dined
I am sure we will find
Better incest than Oedipus Rex.
Why should such sex vex
Or disturb or perplex
Or induce a disparaging tone?
After all, don't you see,
Since we're both of us me,
When we're having sex, I'm alone!
And after I'm done
She will still have her fun
For I'll clone myself twice ere I die.
And this time without fail,
They'll be both of them male
And they'll each ravage her by and by.
First verse and chorus by Randall Garrett; other verses by Isaac Asimov.
It's not a bluff. And here we go. Remember: since you are a Xtian, I trust that you will have scripture to substatiate all your claims. Believe you me that I will have scripture to substantiate mine:
1. How must I be saved? (Be very careful how you answer this one!)
2. How can God be moral when he calls for ethnic clensing and the murder of infants by ripping them out of the wombs of their pregnant mothers?
3. Why would God kill people for petty reasons, such as touching the ark of the covenant or merely NOT praising God (Acts 12:23) and yet he let me survive after committing deliberate blashpemy?
4. Is a bat a bird?
5. Jesus made a fig tree wither. Did it wither immediately or not immediately?
6. How many Gods are there - 1, 3, or 4?
7. Did both thieves crucified beside Jesus curse him, or did one curse him and the other praise him?
8. How can God be both just and merciful?
9. How can God be considered just when he punishes many for the acts of one?
10. How can God be considered just when he punishes one for the acts of many?
11. How can God be considered merciful when he would punish multitudes of people with eternal torture?
12. What happens to the souls of aborted fetuses?
Please use email.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
And yet if other parts of the bible are taken literally then the bat is a bird, the ark rested on more than one mountain at once, the earth has for corners, sticks can turn into snakes, and the sky has a window in it. I'd suggest trying to reconcile Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 before trying to reconcile Genesis 1 with evolutionism.
I have never met a Christian who, when confronted with a contradictory or ridiculous scriptural passage, did not play the "That's what it says, but that's not what it means" game. Tell me, does the earth have four corners?
And as far as accountability goes, God killed Herod for the petty act of *not* praising him. David banged Bathsheba and arranged for her husband's death and God let him be king. Furthermore (I'm still better than God who is a wimp and a liar), I have blasphemed every day for the past two years deliberately and God sees fit that I survive. Explain.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
> For the record, the 'why does a loving God allow
:)
> bad things' argument has been settled for rather
> more than a thousand years now. It has to do
> with free will; you cannot allow free action
> without allowing evil action with it. Then you
> get to the question of why free will; the answer
> is that automata don't provide the same joy that
> individuals do. To be slightly on-topic, imagine
> the difference between a computer, which does
> always as it is told, and a child, who disobeys
> but is an intelligent individual. Which would
> you rather have? I'd rather have the kid. YMMV,
> of course.
Now now now... Be fair this has not been settled but in your own mind. There are many philosophical proofs for the existance and conversely the non-existance of god. We can take any one of these things and make it a proof based on our own perception of the idea.
For instance I can take the proof that the idea of god exists therfore god must exist because we can't conceve of something like that without a truth. Well the problem with that is that I can conceve of a purple rooster. Because I can conceive it dosen't in fact make it true.
But returning to your free will argument. Why does a gods actions soley lay on our heads? I mean the victor does write history. So if it's attributed to a god then he himself made that descision and cast the act yes? if we are in his image then HE has free will also. Therfore if he has free will then he did as he wanted and wiped mankind from the earth. He had that choice nothing forced him/her/it to do that. It's so easy to say that man was corrupt there and that he had no choice. There is always another choice being it a god or human making the descision.
or it was a cataclysmic event that was attributed to a god. Who knows?
oh and let's not get into free will verses freedom of action.
"We want to take over the world, but we don't want to do it tomorrow, it's OK if it's next week"-- Linus Torvalds
I think worries over clone factories and governments using this "revolutionary" technique to stamp out zillions of genetically engineered soldiers misses one important fact - for every single cloned embryo, some woman has to carry that thing in her womb for most of the 9 months and then bear the child. And finding zillions of women willing (and able) to perform such a task for someone other than themselves or their families seems to me highly unlikely.
Cloning sheep is much easier because the ewe doesn't get much choice as to whether she gets impregnated by a scientist in the lab; she's just an animal. But I'm thinking that it ain't gonna go so well for a scientist who attempts to force that on a woman.
Cloning is merely a novel way of creating an embryo, as opposed to the more typical (and considerably more fun) method used heretofore. But it doesn't appear to me that there are any shortage of people willing to contribute to embryo-creation in the old-fashioned way, does it? The real trick, the one that would legitimately raise these questions about what governments and labs might do with them, is if someone figured out how to go from egg to full-term healthy baby without the participation of a female to carry it.
Until that happens, I'm mostly yawning about the "Brave New World" scenarios.
-- Ryan Waldron
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
Deals
(2) Knowing that one is a clone is likely to have psychological consequences. I know that I am unique and that's important for my world-view. Imagine that you know that you are a clone of some guy, a copy of him. How does that make you feel?
I think I'm getting more and more depressed. I just realized that I'm a clone of half my father and half of my mother. I'm not complete. Just half of each.
I'm going to kill myself. Gotta go now....
Since bringing a cloned child into the world would, quite obviously, cause a damn lot of controversy and harassment for the cloned child, is it ethical for someone to do this to a child? Clone or not, it is still a child, just like everyone else, excepting the method of conception. If I know that if I bring a black man to a kkk meeting that the chances are pretty slim that he'll get out unscathed from the ensuing barrage of 'good ol boys', then I would be partially ethically responsible for his misfortune. The same goes that if I choose to bring a clone into the world, knowing fully that the clone will be singled out by an even larger group of 'good ol boys', would I be wrong for doing so?
There's no point in harassing a child because it is a clone. Just like I had no say in the way I was born, neither does the child. No one has a perfectly easy life, but a clone would have an even harder life if the news got out that the person was a clone.
oh my god ...
... Bill gates the second ?
:)
:))
can we stand another Bill Gates on the next generation ?
one with the same capacity to "overrule" the world ? (as we know it?)
maybe we should start cloning Linux activists from now on to get the world a better place !
or we might get that urine sample from Linus so we can clone 2000 of him to get the kernel work done quicker
Freaker / TuC
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I think that growing replacement parts from a person's own tissues would be a great thing.
I also think that cloning individuals would be no different that spawning a twin of yourself.
What I dread are the failures that will occur along the road to perfecting the cloning technique. Yes, some will be detected early enough to abort, but some will not. Remember the lab in Alien Resurrection? Therefore I do not believe that we should continue to develop cloning of humans, because the price of the *inevitable* mistakes will be paid by innocent people - who never had a choice!! Isn't it bad enough that debilitating genetic disorders arise "naturally"? The whole think reeks of eugenics and Nazi contempt for individual human suffering.
Man, if you can't remember that it came out of the Holy Trilogy, you definitely need to clone some more brain cells.
"UNIX" is never having to say you're sorry.
How do you do that? Today we have the technology to clone embryoes, which develop into full human beings. If you take an arm from a clone, the clone is going to be mighty upset Even if we could produce a body without a brain, the body would die because it needs the brain to function
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Yes it would be wonderful to be able to replace damaged body parts from the same genetic stock, but if the price of doing so is maiming another Human being (a human clone is still human), then it's not worth it.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Oh, by the way: please don't delude yourself as to whether or not you have made a leap of faith or two. I will guarantee you that you have, m'boy.
I'm waiting...
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Ha Ha! That's a good one! Leno must have really been funny the night you heard that one.
Really now. If what you say is really true, then the ranks of "good" scientists must number in the single digits. Let's be honest, friend. Scientists make absolutist claims about evolution, the big bang, the age of the universe, the non-existence of God, etc. all the time. And I know of only one scientist (Lewontin, but there may be others) who is willing to admit the highly religious nature of this behavior (and if you didn't know, Lewontin -- a Harvard biologist -- is no theist).
Get a grip, boy. Absolutist claims are characteristic of all religions -- including evolutionism.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
I am not even remotely troubled by the fact that some, few, or many people believe in something as grotesquely wrong as theistic evolution -- with the single exception of being concerned for their souls.
Evolution and Genesis 1 cannot be harmonized. There is no getting around it. One or the other must be jettisoned, or a person must hold in suspension two beliefs that are so manifestly contradictory that I wonder if there is anything that he won't believe.
Sorry, but those are the facts.
Unless you'd like to demonstrate that Genesis 1 "can" be harmonized with evolution?
I won't hold my breath waiting.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Genesis says that God created us from the dust of the earth. See Genesis 2 and 3 and the book of Job. This is not evolution.
Besides this, the sequence of events in Genesis cannot be reconciled with evolution, nor can they be reconciled with the idea that a day is something besides 24 hours. Note how plants were created before the sun as a single example. Now, either the Bible is correct about this or the evolutionists are. The two cannot be reconciled.
The problem with so-called "theistic evolutionists" is that they are attempting to bring harmony to radically contradictory views. They are trying to harmonize what God says with the views of men who hate God.
But a day is a relative measure of time. It's probably not even meant to be taken literally, being more of a symbolic amount of time.
See Genesis 1, where we are told that a day amounts to "morning and evening." How is that not to be taken literally? Granted, the term "day" does (in both Hebrew and English) have the ability to refer both to 24 hours and to an indeterminate amount of time -- depending upon context. There is nothing in the context of Genesis 1, in Hebrew or English (yes, I do know Hebrew) that suggests any other interpretation than that of 24 hours.
This would not even be an issue except that some people prefer to judge the Bible by the findings of men who hate God rather than the other way around. The Bible does NOT support evolution. Period. Any attempt to harmonize the two is hopelessly compromised.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
The scientific method cannot establish the Big Bang, because it cannot be replicated in the lab. The scientific method cannot establish that God does not exist, either -- yet that does not stop the evolutionists from confidently asserting it. Go think.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
The Hebrew text doesn't support what you are suggesting. The English text doesn't support what you are suggesting. There is not a hint in the book of those days in Genesis 1 being anything other than 24-hour regular days.
As for circular arguments -- I would love it if more evolutionists would admit to using them. Personally, I freely admit it. I use them. Everyone does, because there's no other choice. Evolutionists have assumed things as true that they have never proven.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
But there's a difference between saying that someone is wrong and saying that they will go to hell. I don't presume to judge the pope. I don't know him.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
You know. You lie to me and to yourself if you deny it.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Really?
What is the Bible, then? A bag of neat ideas?
"To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them" (Isaiah 8:20). God seems to disagree with you. So who's right -- you or God?
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
-God exists Okay so far
-It is necessary to have a soul to really live. Bzzt! Didn't even make it to your most important assumption...unless you are guilty only of poor expression. If you don't have a soul, you're not alive at all. You're dead. Literally.
-To have a soul, one needs to have been conceived naturally. Bzzt!! Baseless assumption. Adam had a soul. So did Eve. So do test tube babies (if they didn't, they'd be dead).
Sorry, but your assumptions failed, so your conclusions are baseless. Please play the game again when you have something more consistent to offer.
In the meantime, think about this: what makes you think you have the right to decide what sort of God you're going to believe in?
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Who's right -- you who deny a standard, or God who says there is one (Isaiah 8:20)?
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Governments may institute so-called "freedom of religion" but to conclude that God does the same is not only foolish -- it is hazardous to your health.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
I should say to begin with that I'm not a specialist in the field of human genetics or biotechnology, but part of this story strikes me as a little implausible. Ordinarily I trust the BBC a great deal, so perhaps there is a qualified biochemist/biotechnologist out there who can confirm the feasibility of this for me.
What worries me is the use of a cow egg and human DNA. This seems a little like trying to use an iMac to run SGI binaries; it is my understanding there are significant differences between the internal "hardware" (organels and biochemistry) of cells from different species, and our evolutionary lineage split off from cattle many millions of years ago.
This is part of what makes the "Jurassic Park" scenario unlikely; even if we could extract and reconstruct a dinosaur's DNA, there's no guarantee it would "execute" properly on a modern reptile or bird cell.
parallax
So, in closing, get your facts straight, dumbass.
Besides, there's something to be said for the actual act of creating a child. ;)
WRT your comment on Dolly's clone's age. Frankly, that's not really true. Do you describe your age as how long you've existed on the earth? Or how much life you've lived? Or do you just tell people how long your telomeres are? Dolly's clone is younger than Dolly because she has been on this planet for a shorter amount of time. Sure, her telomeres are shorter and, as a result, her cells can't divide as many times, but that just means her overall lifespan will be (marginally) shorter.
Ack - I'm sure it won't be long before some rouge scientist clones some wealthy individual (like you know who, heheh - I mean Mr. Burns) in an underground lab and the public won't find out about it untill the bugger is over 10 years old or something.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The cows are it, man. They're going to be running the place before too long. "...and the Beef shall inherit the Earth."
--JT
Ok, let me enlighten you. Force=mass*acceleration right? That has been taught in physics classes as truth. Why? Because it has been proven? No, it has not been proven. However, they can not disprove it and it is right in every case they have tried therefore they accept it as truth.
F=MA can be TESTED repeatedly and used to accurately predict the future! Can this also be said of Noah's arc or people living on Jupiter? NO! This is a critical difference of faith, F=MA is more of an expectation that the universe will continue to operate as we have observed it millions of times before. Believing in Noah's arc or people living on Jupiter requires FAITH in the accuracy of some book or somebody's imagination. If I doubt the physics book I can quickly set up a little experiment here to verify that F=MA appears correct, can you do the same for Noah's arc?
By the way, I think that F=MA may have been PROVEN slightly incorrect. (I could be wrong, I don't remember all of the ramifications of relativity). Much of Newtonian physics has been shown to be just an approximation of reality, although a very good one for people, cars, and other objects that are not traveling anywhere near the speed of light.
You should check out the writing of James Randi at http://randi.org to help sort out the difference between science and, well, not-science.
That site had nothing to do with creation or God. It had to do with people saying that they had supernatural abilities, UFOs, and such stuff as that. The topic here is that creation can be proven through science.
That site ( randi.org) is "on topic" (or as on topic as any of this) because he applies real science (as in "the scientific method", not guys in white lab coats) to psychics other various pseudo-science. Most people have no idea what science IS. Go learn.
The scientific method cannot establish the Big Bang, because it cannot be replicated in the lab. The scientific method cannot establish that God does not exist, either -- yet that does not stop the evolutionists from confidently asserting it. Go think.
I agree. Anyone who claims that the scientific method can be used to prove that God does not exist is probably very wrong. However, I do not think that I have ever seen that assertion made. My point was that believing in F=MA is very different from believing in Noah's arc.
> Seriously, imagine if that sort of thing were
> said about any religion: Islam, Hinduism,
> Buddhism &c. No civilised person says that
> sort of thing in public (in private, of course,
> we all keep our own counsel on these things),
> and yet no-one is afraid to libel Christianity.
That's because in western countries there aren't powerful muslim, hindu or buddhist lobby groups with influence over government, which pretend to know better than everybody how each person should lead their lives.
I have no love for _any_ religion, not hinduism, judaism, buddhism or islam. Yet these religions leave me alone. On the other hand, it's always christians that lobby for my kids to be forced into prayer at school, that abuse my friends who decide to have an abortion, that abuse my friends who are gay, and who are calling for tighter censorship laws. Some even wish to chastise my wife for using contraception.
If I were living in Egypt, I'm sure the pressure would come from islam. In that case, my harshest criticisms would be reserved for islam, not christianity. See? It's nothing personal - it just happens that christianity is the most powerful religion in these parts.
>Concerning cloning, my opinion as a Christian is
>that it is just one more way of bringing life
>into existence. I find it to be about as silly
>as IVF; the normal way of producing children is
>so much more fun;-) I am rather uncomfortable
>with these people who are so obsessed with having
>children that they go through these procedures;
>it's not healthy to be so consumed.
Maybe, but that's your opinion. And of course you're welcome to have any opinion you wish, and voice it too, as long as you don't interfere with the rights of others. In this case, some people who can't have children will go to IVF, and will consider this to be an acceptable alternative. Nothing wrong with that.
Finally, cloning has valuable medical benefits too. It's possible to work out through cloning how genetic diseases arise, and it could be possible to detect likely victims and treat them early. The benefits are immense. I appreciate you may be against it, but please understand that others may not share your views.
Maybe it is time that we think ahead a bit and introduce some laws that protect the rights of clones (ie. that they are human just like anyone else and *must* be treated as such).
:).
Maybe also a law about genetic privacy (ie no one can clone you without your permission; yeah, I know it won't stop the Illuminati, but...I think it would be good anyway
Granted laws don't really stop anyone who would want to do these things, but at least it would give us legal power to seek damages if they were caught.
Any thoughts on this?
This sig is false.
Delay the inevitable?
I am a christian and I don't try and delay anything. God's timing will not be changed by anything I say or do. The Bible does say that man's knowledge will increase drastictly as the end of time approaches. I therefore expect thinks like this.
Joseph
Romans 10:9-10
"Which bible? "
Not the UNIX bible or the Windows bible, but the Bible. I don't care which translation. English is always good.
"What does 'mans knowledge will increase' mean? "
That is not the exact quote and I appoligize for not having the scripture handy. I will look it up later and post a more specifc passage for you.
"Compared to what? how can this be measured? "
How can any amount of knowledge be measured? Only against what we knew in the past. A paraphrase of the meaning of the scripture would be that our knowledge is going to increase beyond what we ever thought possible. I'll try and give you the verses so you can read it yourself.
"God's timing will not be changed by anything I say or do"
"which god?"
The only God. Which name? Jahova, "I am", Lord God, God Almightly... They all were used at different times because he was different things to different people. To one person he was a healer at the time they were addressing him. To another a friend. The names reflect those relationships.
"The protestant one? catholic one?"
Most religions differ only in a few minor issues such as, "Can you sprinkle or do you need to be dunked"
The only thing that matters is if you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior. See my signature.
The other stuff is important but not a Heven or Hell issue.
"what if you don't believe in god?"
Belief is something is not what makes it true or false.
http://www.drdino.com is some good reading for you.
or what if our jewish?
Same God, they just don't believe that Jesus has came yet. The Bible even say that they would do so before they did.
What are you talking about?
The only thing that will ever matter in this world. In 100 years, will it have mattered if we ran Linux or Windows? Will it matter if we were famous? This stuff is just along for fun.
Trying to live for the truth,
Trith
Romans 10:9-10
http://www.drdino.com
Romans 10:9-10
This is typical of the blinding nature of faith. It is assumed right IN SPITE OF evidence, not BECAUSE OF evidence. One could just as easily say "I am going to assume that there are humans living on Jupiter until it is proven wrong." If we thought like this person then we would have to accept every hair-brained idea until someone could "prove" it wrong.
-----------------------------------
Ok, let me enlighten you. Force=mass*acceleration right? That has been taught in physics classes as truth. Why? Because it has been proven? No, it has not been proven. However, they can not disprove it and it is right in every case they have tried therefore they accept it as truth. Most people don't know this but it's true. If you doubt, I can give you an e-mail to the guy who invented R2-D2. He is a professor at Tennessee Technological University and in the Engineering department. By the way, they are ranked 5th in the entire United States in Engineering.
Neat huh?
Joseph
Romans 10:9-10
Again, I will present you with facts that I don't have on have on hand here at work. I can get these for you if you need them though.
It can be shown that in order for the Crand Canyon to have been made, the colorado river would have had to flow uphill. It can also be shown with Geological layers that one whale is both thousands of years old and millions of years old. How? Well, there is a whale that is trapped in several geo layers at once. It is vertical. It's called "The Baline (sp) whale on it's tail" It was found in CA. How could this have happened? How could the crand canyon have been formed if the water had to go uphill? Perhaps it was a world wide flood. A flood of that magnitude would be able to wipe out sedimentary rock easily. With all this mud, a whale could have been positioned vertical and dryed accourdingly.
I also love this about science
"How do you know the bone is 100 years old?"
"Because we found it in layer x"
"How do you know layer x is 100 years old?"
"Because we found this 100-year-old bone in it"
Is it me or is this circular reasoning?
There is a dinosaur fossil that has a human footprint in it too.
It takes more faith to believe evolution than it does to believe creation.
Romans 10:9-10
That site had nothing to do with creation or God. It had to do with people saying that they had supernatural abilities, UFOs, and such stuff as that. The topic here is that creation can be proven through science.
Romans 10:9-10
Since science admits when they are wrong. I guess I won't be hearing about Carbon dating anymore. I'm also glad to know that the whole layer dating issue is gone for good. Not to mention that a 2-year-old Biology book at college is still trying to show the horse/graffe argument. Remember, if you keep cross breeding tomatos long enough, you'll eventually get a dog.
Romans 10:9-10
You mean one should wait until they have been born? Some Xtians don't seem to have too much agaist killing them for obscure reasons then... :-)
Anything that pisses off the RR is a good thing.
The brain is just meat right? just like the rest of our bodies.. I think you guys are talking about the soul.. thats the human part. Can we clone that?
"For example, you have two families. Each family has one boy and one girl. Each boy marries the other girl. They have children. They children can't possibly reproduce due to the problem of genetic inbreeding. Think of this on a larger scale. If we start filling up the planet with duplicates, think of how close we become to having just two families left.
:-)
This is the frightening part, we will ultimately breed ourselves out of life."
From someone who earns his Biology degree next semester:
1) Duplicates would definately affect allele frequency (if not all people cloned themselves at the same rate), but this would not be considered "inbreeding", unless there was less stigma for a male clone and a female clone from the same family marrying then a brother and sister marrying...it wouldn't lead to a higher proportion of inbreeding.
2) When two different blood lines combine, it can be considered a "new" line of blood.
3) There are constant mutations, genetic drift, crossing-over, and other genetic forces that will create "new" blood lines and create diversity.
4) Due to geographic isolation, it is very unlikely that all blood-lines would converge faster then the forces that create new diversity.
Find something else to worry about.
As far as I can tell, this is, from an ethical standpoint, no different than in-vitro fertilization ("test-tube babies").
Cloned or not, the end result, had they successfully continued the experiment, would have been nothing more than a baby. Sure, the baby would have been a "delayed identical twin" to the donor of the adult cell, but still just a baby.
Personally, I think human cloning is a non-issue. Since all it does is produce a baby, aside from a few overly wealthy wierdoes, I think most of us would prefer the old-fashioned way to make babies. It's a lot cheaper, a lot more reliable, and MUCH more fun....
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
This specific technology? I doubt it. In order
for a secret corporate conspiracy to use this, they'll need:
1)Some way of carrying the baby to term
2)An investment of 15+ years to raise and educate the baby.
3)Money to pay for feeding, clothing, educating, medically supporting, etc. the baby....
And that's on TOP of the cost of trying to clone an adult, which gives them no benefit over an ordinary baby, which has the same requirements.
If you think ConspiracyCorp, Inc. can pop some cells in a vat and quickly pump out an army of trained atomic robot zombie clones, you've been watching too much star trek or something...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
People have been making new people for quite some time now. The advent of a new way to create people should not surprise us. We humans are rather clever.
BUT! If we do create new people via cloning, I know it would be WRONG to not grant them the same level of rights as a normally created human. Would you create another person to harvest his organs? Would it matter if that person was cloned or born via natural pregnancy? It should not matter. I don't fear cloning. I fear the extreme abuse and reaction to it.
I am also not too keen on cloning human embryo's, then destroying them. I feel uneasy about it, while I do understand the reasons behind it.
Be cool.
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Right, yes, certainly a clone is a human just as much as any other human, in discussion between two sensible individuals (of a modern Western background, with moderate religious views ... other times and cultures may differ). The problem is, however, that laws only erratically reflect the ethical agreements of humanitarian philosophers, and even when they do, not everyone obeys the laws. There are several scenarious that are likely to actually happen at least once in the future.
An eventual problem will be slave-clones, born and raised to work in factories. This is going to be science fiction only for a long time to come - it requires that cloning be relatively cheap and reliable, and that it can be done without a human host mother. The last I heard, the latter hadn't been accomplished. Advantages to this technique - in some countries with views other than ours, such clones -may not- be legally human, and this will be legal. Even if it is not legal - there are no mothers, no birth records, no evidence at all. If the international ethics groups come looking, the slavers can just fire the whole setup, and claim accidental disaster. Look for the problem in 50-100 years.
Then there's the immortality quest - a forward-thinking individual who makes his first million by 25 or inherits his money could freeze a sample of his cells, start a clone growing when he's sixty, and at his age 80, depending on if the Dolly problem is solved, have either 45 or 25 have fully genetically compatible parts. This requires only the technology we have, but will be rendered pointless if we learn to clone body parts without growing a whole person. Good argument for continuing research. Look for this problem in as little as 20-30 years, or the moment the Dolly problem of aged organs has been solved.
A more subtle, creeping problem - genetic purism. Take a cell sample of an 'ideal person' (probably the cloner him/her self), tweak any genetic deficiencies (anemia, nearsightedness, colorblindness, allergies, crooked teeth, whatever) and raise a flock of children with the same ideals who in turn raise another generation... This is not a problem when it's one looney in a backwater. Look for it as a problem if cloning-as-reproduction becomes acceptable, but remains expensive, because then racial wealth divisions come into play. Look for this problem in... oh... a few centuries. No society I know of would tolerate this right now, so time is needed for culture shift. May be self-solving when the lack of genetic diversity of the 'problem nation' does them in.
Perfect Soldiers and Perfect Spies - in combination with genetic engineering, raised by espionage agencies to replace field agents. This could begin immediately, but there's little benefit. Once the Dolly problem has been solved, there will be clones of the very best soldiers and spies. If artificial aging can be induced, there may be perfect dopplegangers, but as another poster pointed out, cloning isn't magic - the clone grows at human rates. Solving the Dolly problem may (or may not) reveal a way to induce artificial aging selectively so you can age features but leave organs intact - or age everything - depending on the accuracy needed. Replacements will still probably need -at least- ten years to be grown, maybe a full 18-20, so they will be rare. Perfect soldiers and spies have the all the advantages of the slaves in the first scenario - look for them almost immediately.
None of which means that we should not research cloning technology, of course. Human beings will be vicious animals towards each other with or without technology, and -I'd- sure like to be able to live for two or three hundred years, which cloning research will directly and indirectly enable, with replacement organs and a better understanding of aging triggers. I just want my replacement organs grown -without- my twin.
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Cloning in my opinion is NOT a good thing, too many downsides. First of all, a lot of people wouldn't like the idea of being an artificial clone. Second, imagine, Bill Gates, cloned, and cloned again, living F-O-R-E-V-E-R! I constantly have nightmares about that, he's rich enough to have his own cloning labratory and already have clones. It may sound like science fiction, but what if he already died 3 times and no one knows?!?! Think about it.
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
{Begin sarcasm}
Ruthlessness has delivered such fantastically
superior monoculture to our computing environment
that I'm sure we'd all love to apply the same
model to our biological infrastructure. Look at
what a horrific and extinction-destined mess that
altruistic open-source movement had as its
computing environment!
{End sarcasm}
The overman lives, then dies.
The community thrives because of an infrastructure
of compassion and good will. Evolution occurs
within such a population. As an individual, I
hope that I contribute to that biological, mental,
*and* spiritual evolution, but it is a terrible
mistake to usurp judgement of an individual's
capacity to contribute. E.g., you might have
discarded the design for one Stephen Hawking.
There are other models for the survival of a
species, but they aren't to my taste. The
cockroach, for instance.
I don't think that any of us here object to fighting for the basic rights of clones -- a right NOT to be a guinea pig and to be respected as a life form (most especially if it's a conscious life form, which is what a human clone would be).
The problem is that religious fundamentalists have consistently tried to stop science from "knowing" what they think "Man was not meant to know", which is a pretty ridiculous phrase. Knowing how to make an atom bomb and using it are two different things, and while morality can tell us that using it to kill people is wrong (even in WWII, though it undoubtedly saved more lives), it cannot tell us "not to know" it.
"... I declare our city to be a free and independent state to be named Tri-Insula!" --Fernando Wood, Mayor of NYC 1861
Perhaps I'll go down and get some Ben & Jerry's (TM) now, or perhaps not. Perhaps I'll go to the bathroom. Perhaps I'll spend another hour on Everything or watch a Seinfeld rerun. Perhaps...
you get the idea. Perhaps the embryo would be the next Hitler? And perhaps not.
"... I declare our city to be a free and independent state to be named Tri-Insula!" --Fernando Wood, Mayor of NYC 1861
...I like most anything that pisses people off. ;) Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating the breeding of human clone-slaves or the torture or anything living, because if we didn't have any ethics whatsoever we'd all be dead. But upsetting those religious kooks who think that the materials of life are 'special' and can't be put together by humans is just plain fun!
"... I declare our city to be a free and independent state to be named Tri-Insula!" --Fernando Wood, Mayor of NYC 1861
There was a Sliders episode which, like most of the recent Sliders episodes, was cheezy, but also dealt with some of the heart of this issue. I imagine that it would be much, much more difficult to clone just a leg, than to clone a whole person. The problem is, what do you do with the rest of the body. It is a clone of you, and thus, by any sane reasoning, has all the rights and protections you should have. Sure, you can never educate them, other than to impregnate in their mind that they exist to provide you with replacement body parts. Self sacrifice to save someone else's life always has been a noble purpose, but conditioning thousands, if not millions of people that self-sacrifice is their only purpose in life is definitely cruel. Cloning a genius after they die could prove to be a great boon for technology, but it would also, no doubt, make the clone's life hell. They would spend their whole life trying to live up to what their previous self did. It would be far better, I think, to track traits of people, and encourage geniuses to breed together. You also might argue that one should encourage geniuses to breed with morons. Again, either way has serious moral difficulties. One way favors the production of an elite class, which would certainly bring discrimination and unrest. The other way might raise the intelligence of many people, but also might slow, or even reverse, evolutionary progress if practiced for a long time. It would be a good experiment into how much of intelligence and such things is genetic, and how much is innate, although I doubt that any human would ever be capable of treating it in a sufficiently objective way so as to get accurate results out of it.
What's the bottom line? Any kind of messing with the way evolution naturally procedes can cause serious practical and moral problems. Not to say that the pursuit of this kind of knowledge should be avoided, but its use should be thought out carefully. Research laboratories should not be shot up like abortion clinics occaisonally have, but they also shouldn't go crazy with putting this kind of technology into every aspect of our lives.
-Cheetah
Sure, thats all true now, but whats to stop the government from narrowly defining 'human' or 'person'?
Ala, "A person is one born from the coupling of a man and a woman". Clones aren't born that way, therefor they aren't human, therefore the rights that protect people from the treatment you spoke of don't apply.
Don't think they wont, btw, look at the narrow definition of marriage that is used to block same sex couples from getting right to adopt, pensions, health benifits, etc.
And the robot says: "In the begining was man. Man created all things. Man, with his infinite skill, created machines
Linus, Larry Wall, Alan Cox.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
Let's have a poll for the clone worthiest person.
As with the abortion issue, you end up needing to create categories but not being able to draw firm lines. Or you do draw firm lines, and have to face their arbitrary nature when someone goes to court.
I see two basic categories in the clone issue.
First is growth from a single cell to some early fetus state. In this stage one could _arguably_ say that the being does not have consciousness or a soul or whatever, and that we can ethically harvest stem cells or other products for use in people with serious diseases. _Arguably_, I said. Some people would go further and say we could use the cells for any purpose (cosmetic surgery, or vanity brain pumping through neural injections), while some would say using any products to save human lives or quality of life already goes too far.
The second stage starts roughly when a fetus achieves some form of consciousness or "humanness", after which it should be illegal to kill, abandon, or exploit the fetus (person). This would be an extremely hard definition to draw. It differs from the "viability" test in the abortion issue if we are talking about clones in a general sense without host mothers (think Brave New World or The Matrix), as the fetus is never dependent on another human's body.
Despite the difficulty in drawing such a line, to me it is crystal clear that a human child or adult born from cloning technology, even from a Brave New World vat, is a human. Just as a twin is a human, as is his/her twin. A "cloned person" (which is a slightly nicer term for someone than a "clone"; would you want to be called a "f*ck"?) is a person, and you cannot harvest a person's kidneys without their permission. Unless you are some Dr. Mendele freak living in Brazil, in which case you are already a serious criminal trying to live outside of the law. For the Mayo Clinic, there should never be any question that a cloned person is a person with rights.
Thus to me the most interesting question is at what point I would say "leave that zygote/fetus alone, it's a person you're now committed to 'birthing'."
Can Science create the existence a living being? Oh yes, of course we can.
Can it create life by your definition?
Why not?
Your being simple, a cloned human would be physicaly very similar to the original, however, within keeping of certain genetic traits, it will grow up to be like whatever it develops to be.
It might be Happy and "Live" my your definition, or be misserable and not. The fact it has been cloned has no bearing on this.
Now, thats probably obvious to anyone.
the "Psychiatry and psychoanalysis" you so readily attack don't have all the facts, and guess what fundy? no one does. The good ones do more then just preach lies, they try and find the missing information. Sometimes they get bad results, thems the breaks, but its better then lying.
Finally, i would like to say "Here! Here it is you bastards!!" to those religeous assholes you always said that Science and only take life away. Any inteligent person realizes that of course, this is not true and never has been. Those religeous freaks are always the first in like for the booster shots should something go wrong.
Well anyway, now science can create life, for sure, here it is out in the open, and you still fight it.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
Why on earth did you pick China, of all countries, as an example? China already has lots of people; I doubt they are under any pressure to make more.
Hmm... except that gives me an idea. Certainly some aspects of human psychology as genetic. Normally, if I wanted to start a cult consisting of people, I would have to sift through a lot of people to find the sheep-like ones that would obey me without much fuss. But if I could find a particularly good genotype for this sort of thing, I could using cloning to make a bunch of them. (BTW, I would probably pick a female, so that I could use them to incubate the next generation.)
The Chinese seems to be pretty competent at using violence to keep its people in line. But if they could replace their citizens with clones based on an order-obeying genotype -- imagine a China that didn't have to point guns at its own people! They could divert resources from urban control to ... the front lines!
How's that for a paranoid wacko idea about cloning? ;-) The problem is that roughly the same thing is achievable with selective breeding; cloning isn't really needed. In fact, a lot of my exploitive ideas for cloning are in fact do-able with good old-fashioned Nazi-style eugenics. Oh well.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Honestly, it's not really a big deal. All a clone is is an identical twin who happens to be a generation younger. That's basically it. Big Deal
:-)
But Dolly the sheeps clone is just as "old" as Dolly, so it's not really a kid that's younger, just a kid that's less mature(?) (If you dont know what i'm talking about look around the article was announce here on slashdot a few weeks ago)
The whole thing is kind of freaky. Personally I think clones should exist within the scope of the person being cloned, i.e. if I had a clone it would also have my name, my social security number, my credit card number, etc.. That way people wont clone foolishly as they wont want to fight themselves for their personal resources/property.
-Rich
Geez! This is terrific. Geez! This is terrible. Therer are two main arguments regarding this matter. Yes, it would be wonderful to clone, say, a leg for one that was lost in an accident. It would be beautiful to give somebody the hand that was maimed at birth. How horrid to have to worry that you were the only you in the world. Awful to consider the ethics of this.
So, good? Bad? Who knows. But, this is for sure "Stuff that Matters."
Heart, Hands, Honour
...when you could have your own Mini-Me?
Of course this could end up being very good for Christians. What if they allow a clone to grow, and it has a completely different personality... interesting, Genes have 0 to do with the "Id", or Soul? Very interesting.
I think there are some ethical issues, but I'm not as much against it as most Christians, since it may end up helping prove a major seperation between Soul and Body.
And yes, abortion of clones is a Bad Thing(tm), as are any others.
-- Keith Moore
This sig is the express property of someone.
Maybe I'm getting old, but it seems that the rate of technology advances are accelerating faster than ever. In the last year or so we've seen clones, ion drives, artifically-sort-of-intelligent spacecraft, phasers and theoretical advances in, oh, everything. All of which is, of course, a Good Thing.
As far as ethical considerations of cloning are concerned, reports of the dilemma have, I think been greatly exaggerated. If you clone someone, then
1. The result is a child. This child is a normal child in more or less every way, and should be treated as such.
2. A physical clone does not a mental clone make. the resultant offspring will be as unique an individual as anyone else.
3. Remember the brouhaha about IVF when it was first introduced (death of society, brave new world, etc, etc)? Same thing.
the story not too long ago. About the sheep (goat?) or whatever that was cloned, and in just half over a few years, it had already showed signs of equal age to the original subject. Those of you siting examples of using spare body parts need to remember that we are only what we put into ourselves. I personally wouldn't want to have someone else's parts inside me. I think that the technology by itself is a great thing to have, but instead of cloning, why not go into the direction of regeneration, rejuvination so that we would be healing ourselves.
Secondly, someone had mentioned that they didn't see any real threats to having human clones walking around this great planet. The problem is simple. Inbreeding doesn't work, ask any redneck. It's simple really. The world has a finite number of people, multiplying. And eventually everyone will have reproduced with everyone else. We are constantly shortening the distance between clean/new lines of blood.
For example, you have two families. Each family has one boy and one girl. Each boy marries the other girl. They have children. They children can't possibly reproduce due to the problem of genetic inbreeding. Think of this on a larger scale. If we start filling up the planet with duplicates, think of how close we become to having just two families left.
This is the frightening part, we will ultimately breed ourselves out of life.
--nuff said
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
What defines "getting ahead"? Your goals are not necessarily mine. Morality is not necessarily irrational, certain people's moral systems may be, but other's may not be.
Published in 1978, this book was my first exposure to the topic. I recall that at the time, there was some discussion about whether this was fiction or not. Funny that in > 10 years, none of the social/ethical issues have been resolved. Like we say at work: "Do it before someone tells you NO".
-WMc
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. - Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)
My view of abortion is the same with drugs, making something illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
I'd rather have a trained and qualified doctor performing the abortion, than some lab assistant with a bottle of dubious chemicals or some scared teenage girl trying to abort herself with a heated knitting needle.
Also, abortion isn't a modern creation. In the old days, the village wise woman, who generally served as the midwife, was quite able to provide the villagers with the right potion to sort out there little problem.
Related to cloning, the thing I don't understand is, ignoring the can't-have-children idea, the classical use of cloning is to create another you.
Who on earth is vain enough to assume that they are physically perfect, there's always something you would like to change, I'd love to have perfect eye sight.
What would be preferable, and what cloning can't provide, is to allow you consiousness to be preserved. You then have the ability to live different lives in different bodies. You grew up once male, next have a crack at being female.
Mind you, ethically speaking this would open one hell of a can of beans.........
>(3) I think that the thing that most frightens ... have breast ... ".
>people about cloning is not cloning per se, but
>rather the ease of genetic manipulation that
>cloning provides. What is a big ethical problem
>s how to treat designing humans. "Hmm... I
>would like my child to have blond hair and blue
>eyes, be tall and not chunky,
>size YYY / dick size XXX
[snip]
>Or, alternatively, imagine clone banks where you
>can go to pick the genes of your child when you
>can check out how these genes turned out in real
>people.
Consider social forces a bit and these things don't seem quite so scary.
Here's how I look at it:
For society to exist and prosper, there need to be people who do the less desireable jobs, of which there are many. The "designer genes issue" posits that if everyone is shapely and beautiful and has a 160 IQ, there will be nobody to do those jobs, and society will collapse.
The thing is, most people would never, ever take the designer genes route. There was a Time phone poll (admittedly not the most accurate barometer) which said something like less than 10% of the population would want their genetic code changed. Almost nobody would *want* this process, so having a few people use it isn't going to hurt anything.
Of course, a small problem might arise due to social stratification between "dids" and "did nots," but anyone who tries to tell you that stratification isn't already one of society's largest problems (so adding a little bit more isn't really going to change anything) is full of it.
Those who are polled, cold, like the Time poll you mention do not understand how genetic engineering works. If 20 years ago they did the same poll about breast implants, you'd likely get a similar result. It's not lack of desire, it's fear of the process out-weighing the desire. Once it is a proven, low-fault process, everyone will be genetically enhancing themselves/offspring etc...
Blar.
The first three are good idea to do with a clone.... #4 is just a bit wierd and 5 is just plain sick!
But you would have to worry about your clone being evil, you know making it w/ your g/f, getting you fired, ect...
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Like many others, I am gleefully awaiting the response of the religious right, but even more so, I'm dying to see what the outer frontiers will be. Practical applications are also beside the point for me...just keep pushing and let's see what we can create! This is exciting new territory!
If virtue is its own reward, jsut imagine what vice offers!
Mama had a chicken, Mama had a cow, Dad was proud,
.mil and .gov
He didn't care how....
Sorry, had to say it...
Rko
------------
Sgi, we put the . in
I'm pretty fly for a white guy
I do wonder how the Religous Right will react to this. I mean on one hand cloning is against God's way (or so I've heard said). And abortion is evil also. But what about aborting a clone (which they kinda did)? Is that bad? Oh well I guess they won't need any special effects for 'Multiplicity' anymore.
-cpd
Don't worry, I'm fine. Your concern is just the result of your incapability to fully comprehend the situation. Your judgement appears to be blurred by (outdated) relegious concerns and moralism.
Really what objection could one have to slave clones. Of course they should be thoroughly dehumanised: no hard feelings about their fate and a positive attitude towards their job, like horses just love to pull cars and dogs just love to fetch our newspaper.
Jilles
Who said anything about using full grown human beings for such a task. What a waste of energy to let 'em develop a personality and an emotional life just to take it away in order to obtain some spare parts. I say just grow the parts and all that is needed to support them. Pretty much as is done today on a much smaller scale with skin and other types of cells.
What Mengele did was quite a different thing, he took living human beings and experimented on them, quite a cruel thing to do.
Jilles
educated, rational people will react in educated, rational ways, regardless of their religion.
Unfortunately the world is much more complicated than you seem to believe. "Being rational" means very different things to different people. Besides an off-the-cuff definition of rationality would probably look something like "A rational person is one whose system of beliefs is logically coherent and whose behavior is consistent with his beliefs". Do you see the problem here?
Try thinking not in terms of US college-educated suburban upper-middle-class, but in terms of, say, Saudi Arabian or Vietnamese college grads.
Basically, people react based on their value system which has nothing to do with rationality and little to do with education.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Can someone explain what is so "scary" about this? I'm not really that frightened -- the "huge ethical questions" raised seem to have simple answers. (Are clones human? Well, yes. Do they have full human rights? Well, yes. Huh. That seems to end the discussion.)
... have breast size YYY / dick size XXX ... ". In the extreme case I can imagine designing a child, tracking its development as an embryo to see if the manipulation turned out to be OK, and if not, clone the embryo, terminate the unsuccesful one, and go to work on v2.0.
:)
Nothing particularly scary, after all single-egg twins (~1.5% of births IIRC) are clones. Still, there are some things you might want to consider:
(1) If you believe, as a lot of Christians do, that putting the soul into a body (embryo) is God's prerogative, then trying to clone people is a sin of hubris (arrogance).
(2) Knowing that one is a clone is likely to have psychological consequences. I know that I am unique and that's important for my world-view. Imagine that you know that you are a clone of some guy, a copy of him. How does that make you feel?
(3) I think that the thing that most frightens people about cloning is not cloning per se, but rather the ease of genetic manipulation that cloning provides. What is a big ethical problem is how to treat designing humans. "Hmm... I would like my child to have blond hair and blue eyes, be tall and not chunky,
Or, alternatively, imagine clone banks where you can go to pick the genes of your child when you can check out how these genes turned out in real people. "See, the type CX774976 has a very good body, but 56% of these develop mild depression around the age of 30... if you check out type DN8743992, it has no depression tendencies, but it's grade point average in high school tends to be noticeably lower, and of course they have to watch their diet or they'll become fat by middle age...".
And think of how great the responsibility of parents will be...
(4) There are undesirable long-term genetic and demographic consequences to widespread cloning. Working them out is left as the exercise for the reader.
There is more, just think through the consequences and don't stop halfway
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Hm, some people tended to understand my comments as going against cloning. That was not my intent. I think that cloning is morally neutral (as organ transplants per se are morally neutral) and inevitable. All the wailing and gnashing of teeth that's coming from the morons and the religious right is not going to change the fact that the cloning and genetic manipulation of humans is coming.
I think that at first it'll be treated similarly to the way various fertility techniques are viewed now: not necessary for "normal" people (heavy, heavy quotes around 'normal'), expensive, not the proper topic of a party conversation
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Damn tab key. Please ignore the previous post. A note to Rob: perhaps it's a good idea to reconfigure the posting screen so that tabbing out of the comment text box gets you to the *Preview* button instead of *Submit* button?
:). The point of my argument was that cloning is not a cut-and-dried moral issue (as in the post that I was replying to: clones are full humans, problem solved). Yeah, clones *are* full humans, but there are other problems, too... I don't think that we (most people, that is) right now have the concepts and the framework to think deeply and clearly about cloning/genetic manipulation. This is a new area that has been little explored and sweeping generalizations of both kinds (It's evil! No, it's science, so it's good!) do little to help.
Hm, some people tended to understand my comments as going against cloning. That was not my intent. I think that cloning is morally neutral (as organ transplants per se are morally neutral) and inevitable. All the wailing and gnashing of teeth that's coming from the morons and the religious right is not going to change the fact that the cloning and genetic manipulation of humans is coming.
I think that at first it'll be treated similarly to the way various fertility techniques are viewed now: not necessary for "normal" people (heavy, heavy quotes around 'normal'), expensive, not the proper topic of a party conversation, but very useful if you really need them. Later the cloning/genetic manipulation should become more accepted and get to the status of, say, plastic surgery.
There is nothing intrinsically evil about cloning and even nothing clearly evil about the scenarios I described. What's evil about clone banks where you could pick the genes for your child? Still, the idea seems to make most people uncomfortable
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
There are non-religious objectors to cloning as well. Maybe we should just remove all ethical questions from the mix and say "anything goes". After all, ethics just hinder science.
What with cows being used in cloning technology, and cows being used to build that nanotech railway (see previous Slashdot story), this week seems to be a really great week for cows. They seem to be sooo versatile. And they're edible. Cows rock. Is there anything you can't do with cows? Don't answer that.
I don't think your boss would have any reason to suspect anything. Do you like working that much ?
Message on our company Intranet:
"You have a sticker in your private area"
beauty is only a light switch away
Agreed. I am having trouble understanding what all the excitement is about considering clones are not duplicates. A clone would be an individual who just happens to be genetically identical.
Frankly I don't see much advantage. Genetic diversity is generally considered good for a species.
Like Julia Roberts, Sharon Stone,... and some other that aren't known.
Bu this is doomed to stay in my dream. they wouldn't be slave and would have the same right that other people.
Given that they must have these rights (they are human isn't it) we can't produce them to provide implants so would it be worth to do it???
Of course you will always find a nuts to make an army of clones but this would be easy to fight it (just find an allergy or a disease these clones are subject to and they will be diminished).
BTW, in TPM isn't the war called the Clone War???
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
6)create a secret clone and make robbery "No Mister the policeman I was with 200 persons all this evening"
7)Create an army of Schwarzeneger/Stallone/...
Like all technology we can imagine the best and the worse with it.
BTW i suppose you wanted to say "send the clone at work and go to the Bahamas" because what you said is worse than the reality. Why would I pay a travel to the Bahamas to my clone if I must work for it??? Are you dumb
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
I have no problem slandering Islam, Or Scientology... Islam seems almost worse then Xstianity, and Scientology... well I just find that weird
---------------
Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Don`t be silly. A clone is a person just like anyone else. They start off as children, and as they grow up they might well say `No, I don`t want to join your army; no, I don`t want to be your slave`. Yes, if you bring them up right you might be able to turn them into demoralised or deluded slaves, but it would be no less difficult than for any other person.
If 100 people with identical information on the inside get exactly the same information on the outside, well, there's got to be a name for that.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Honestly, it's not really a big deal.
:>
All a clone is is an identical twin who happens to be a generation younger. That's basically it. Big Deal.
Even if the technique becomes accessable to the point where any hospital can do it, it probably won't be used much. It'll have less impact than In-vitro fertalization.
Mostly, cloning will be used for exactly what it started with. Cloning sheep. (and prize bulls, etc) that's where the money is.
And for the one or two rich, self centered bastards out there who will have themselves cloned, really, I couldn't _think_ of a better punishment than for them to have a child who is exactly like _them_
-- -- The Dragon De Monsyne
This is scary, but neat and exciting at the same time ... welcome to the future. oh yeah ... first. tee hee
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
BTW i suppose you wanted to say "send the clone at work and go to the Bahamas" because what you said is worse than the reality. Why would I pay a travel to the Bahamas to my clone if I must work for it??? Are you dumb ;)
that's why it was funny. If I make a clone for some spare parts, it would only be fair to keep it happy.
+&x
..what sci-fi did the "Clone Wars" come from. I can almost remember, maybe I need to clone some more brain cells...
+&x
And Sodom and Gamora, infidels, anyone not around to here the 'wonderful word of god', and even men who have had their penises crushed by a rock. No lie. Look around in Deuteronomy, I think it's in verse 26 somewhere. Bastards can't 'enter the house of the lord' for 5 generations, even though the great great great grandchildren had nothing to do with the fact that a man left his wife so many years ago. Judaism is a tyrant religion.
The Anti-Defamation League will be by to see you shortly...
Seriously, imagine if that sort of thing were said about any religion: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism &c. No civilised person says that sort of thing in public (in private, of course, we all keep our own counsel on these things), and yet no-one is afraid to libel Christianity.
For the record, the 'why does a loving God allow bad things' argument has been settled for rather more than a thousand years now. It has to do with free will; you cannot allow free action without allowing evil action with it. Then you get to the question of why free will; the answer is that automata don't provide the same joy that individuals do. To be slightly on-topic, imagine the difference between a computer, which does always as it is told, and a child, who disobeys but is an intelligent individual. Which would you rather have? I'd rather have the kid. YMMV, of course.
Concerning cloning, my opinion as a Christian is that it is just one more way of bringing life into existence. I find it to be about as silly as IVF; the normal way of producing children is so much more fun;-) I am rather uncomfortable with these people who are so obsessed with having children that they go through these procedures; it's not healthy to be so consumed. Also, I wonder what the actual purpose of cloning is supposed to be. Sex works most of the time, and IVF the rest AFAIK. What's cloning for? So that I may feed my pride and produce copies of myself? I don't see that it has a purpose.
Regarding the destruction of the embryo they created, I hold to my standard position: life begins somewhere between conception and the first cell division. Therefore they killed the poor thing (just like they do with unwanted emryos in IVF); I am very upset regarding that. Think about it: right there they had a creature fully capable of growing up, of going through the perils of childhood, of experiencing his first love, his first rejection, of going to school, of installing Linux :-), of getting married and having children. And they destroyed him, squashed him like an insect (or poisoned him, or starved him, or whatever they did). He never even got to see light, or achieve consciousness (indeed, never even got the chance to grow a brain).
If anything, how can a loving parent allow that sort of thing to happen?
Clones (or modified clones with a "dumbed down" nervous system) are every bit as human as you or I. If some government decides they will start producing clones for labor, defense, etc., they'll in effect be doing not much different than what happened in the US and other countries when slavery was legal and rampant. Basically, you'd have a clone "race" discriminated against and racism not unlike that encountered during the slavery era, except that now you'd be considering these clones as subhuman.
It's fairly unlikely such a thing will happen now, considering that the practice of slavery has been abolished from the majority of countries in the world, and I'm fairly certain that if some government decided to discriminate against the clones, they'd fine themselves in a lot of trouble - be it external pressure or internal rebellion - either from naturally born people or the clones thereof. So I don't find much reason to be worried about such misuse.
Bzzzt, wrong.
If that were the case, Slashdot (and all the geeks who frequent it) would be a part of Microsoft by now. They know how to make money, big-time.
Or is Slashdot not part of the modern world?
--The basis of all love is respect
- cloning of a human body, and
- religious aspects of the mere existance of the clone
While maybe the replica of the body is mostly identical to the original, what about personality (one may say soul). Since birth (end of cloning) every human goes through his/her life and experiences quite different set of events. All those, though maybe not determining, but substantial factors that regulate and control who and what it is. So, can we think that clones are different than those who have been born though "standard" procedure?One gives his/her human cell and after a while there is a "clone". But clone of what? To what extent they are similar, so we call another being a clone? Thay have same DNA, and essentially identical cell level structure, but are they mere copies of each other? Since the very first second their lives are different, they were grown differently, they were born at different times, in different places, experienced different circumstances, met different people. So after we'd "cloned" a body, or raither produced new one that is very close resemblance of the original (more precisely - we just initiated that process, in somewhat unusual way), the nature (God, if you wish) took care of the rest. At the end we have just another human being. Yes, conception was different, but still - nature produced just another human being.
What if we consider that astrology has some merits. Then probably a "clone" would be more distant from the original than a regular identical twin would be - different times, different places, different sky over the clone's head. So, why not we just look at it as just another human being, that has remarcable physical similarity to one of us?
I'm stoked! We're -so- close! The technology is almost there!
What I -really- want to see is the whole bioethical Pandora's Box opened up. I crave the sort of world-wide debate and advancement of opinion you never see these days, Internet nonewithstanding. Religions will topple, new philosophies will emerge, and all modernized cultures will have to adapt their concepts of humanity and life.
We live in such interesting times.
What so many people seem to (conveniently) forget or ignore is that genes evolved for a ruthless and deadly purpose: to outlive all other genes. The most kick-ass gene, the toughest, hardiest, most ruthless son-of-a-gun is the one that lives on. The weak, the defective, the inflexible, perish.
So it's quite logical that to properly use genes(as opposed to being used -by- them) requires a healthy dose of mental, spiritual, and social ruthlessness.
Now, there's a lot of buzz about clones being "people"... they don't have to be. You can easily induce an embryo into not developing a cerebral cortex. You don't have to have "people" as bags of spare parts, because a human body without brain activity is essentially a slab of meat. If we eat and wear animals bred for the purpose, what's wrong with getting a liver or a kidney off of a clone? And if you someone comes crying about the 'sanctity' of human life, just remind them how much easier it is to repair Grampa Olie's '52 Chevy than it is to repair Grampa Olie.
And longevity is not the half of it. The genetic "blueprinting" of children has -got- to be to the most profoundly significant technology in human history. No more will we be at the mercy of the luck of the chromosome shuffle! No more birth defects, no more genetically-transmitted weaknesses! As a species, we can look as good as we want, be as strong as we want, as smart as we want. Blueprinting will allow us to advance our evolution at a rate faster than fruit flies, so we'll adapt to new environments (like Mars!) easier and in less time.
Certainly, to take full advantage of the tools genetics provides requires a large dose of ruthlessness. It requires a strength of opinions and a belief in humanity that most people find either obscene or threatening, or both.
The future of our species will belong to those among us ruthless enough and fearless enough to pick up the gauntlet and build us a brave new world.
THS
---
"Poor girl looks as confused as a blind lesbian in a fish market." - Simon R. Green
a la Star Wars....
The whole point of this research (or at least one of the biggest points) is that if we can clone stem cells, then we can start replacing people's organs from within their existing bodies. That's much cheaper and more ethical than farming humans for the purpose of harvesting organs.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
There is a dinosaur fossil that has a human footprint in it too.
Oh, for crying out loud. Paluxy River, right? You might want to take some time and read through this, if you're so inclined.
One of the differences between scientists and creationists is that scientists acknowledge when their theories are wrong, and either refine or outright reject them and start looking elsewhere. As this "human footprint" evidence proves, the creationist response to being told that something is fraudulent is to stick their fingers in their ears and shout "is not!" Hint: Very few respectable creationists still try to use the Paluxy River "man tracks" as evidence that man and dinosaur co-existed.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Gee whiz, Mr. Wilson! Gollllly!
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Labor pool too small? Human workers on demand.
Contrary to popular opinion, cloning isn't as simple as walking into a pod, some flashing lights, and wallah! a perfect copy of you in every way. A clone has to be born and grow up. They aren't conjured up magically as an adult. My point is that you can't just walk into a Clones 'R' Us and order a dozen coal miners, unless you're willing to wait about 18 years.
Also, according to a report I heard, clones aren't as good as regular people. Supposedly, there is something in DNA that gets shorter as you get older, and if you clone yourself, you create a baby that has 'old' DNA. They said "Dolly" was experiencing this problem. I'm not exactly sure what impact this has, but it's interresting.
-
-
It is possible for your mind to be so open that your brain falls out.
The quote refers to humanity as a whole. I think the fear is, now that the ground has been broken, people will begin to do things with cloning just because they can without any consideration for whether or not they should. Maybe even when they know they shouldn't if there's money to be made.
----------
perl -e 'print(pack("H*","646176652e7761676e657240676d616
If I'm not mistaken, the Clone Wars
of which you speak don't occur until
Annakin becomes Darth and joins the
Emperor in destroying all the Jedi.
This will, I think, be portrayed in
the third episode with the second
episode being about Anni's love affair
with Amadala.
Your guess is as good as mine, though.
IANAL, but I play one on
Since when did science start trying "allay fears about artificial life". The only scary thing is that scientist have to fear popular opinion.
Since when did science start trying "allay fears about artificial life". The only scary thing is that scientist have to fear popular opinion
/*
* This fonction is cloning the program
* (argv = main parameter)
*/
int clone()
{
if ( !fork() )
{
ret=execv(argv[0],argv);
}
}
is the use of antibiotics == murder? is ending the test of a complex neural network == murder? wtf. just because an embryo will be human (probably; sooner or later) doesnt mean it should be treated as one now. a brick, givin the proper tweaking, can become human... that we havnt quite figured how to do it just yet is beside the point.
i think your one of those ppl who believes human life begans at conception; as in, thats when a human gets a soul. what a crock. twins seperate long after conception... does that mean they share souls? if one goes to hell, does that mean the other is likewise doomed?
and what about, say, stem cells? we dont need true conception to do all kinds of interisting things with those. if we grow stem cells in a test tube, does it have a soul? what about more speciallized stuff... skin cells? or fingernails? do fingernails and skin cells have parts of the soul in them?
i hope your starting to see the absurdity of your point of view. if the body is somehow attached to a soul, what part of the body is attached to it? if you say "all of it", then cutting a fingernail is "killing" parts of yourself... and if you say "some of it", well, then what part == "some"? would you be like descartes, and say its the pineal eye? hah...
read some philosophy. stop foolishly "believing". do some peyote. squeegee out your third eye and come back to me. next.
mine truly,
pope sayke XXIII
-- sayke, v2.3.05
Well, is cloning evil per se? Rather, I think cloning is fine as long as the resulting humans are treated as humans, i.e. they are afforded the same rights as a human conceived by insemination ... I think that creating a human who only lives for 5 years falls under the rubric of a rights violation, like a junkie mother held liable for making her child a crack addict, etc.
Wasn't it just in the news that Dolly is aging faster than normal because her DNA chains are shorter (please, will a Bio geek help me here...), and therefore her cells cannot reproduce for as long as a "normally" concieved organism?
I am by far NOT one of those people who have the knee-jerk "genetic-engineering-is-evil" reaction...but what happens [legally, ethically, etc.] when we're able to create people who have naturally shortened lifespans? Is that "fair"?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I wish I had a comment...
Fear my wrath, please, fear my wrath?
Homer
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Yes. All those pesky religions should stop trying to keep you and Sandra apart.
:).
Sorry, but these two comments make such a strange combination that I just had to comment
Maybe some reservations that people (religious or not) have are that the clones will be mistreated Like sexual slavery for example (cough cough)...
I can't imagine how they expect to succeed often if they're using cow eggs. Still, you don't have to be a clairvoyant to see the inevitable coming.
Did it seem like scientists in the BBC article were trying to justify their work? (Like "not for 'reproductive' cloning, just 'theraputic') They know what can happen. That's scary.
Well, as far as "ethical concerns" go, there is only one "ethical concern" in the modern world, and that is "money talks." Once big money hits the cloning industry (and it will become an industry), all government regulation will effectively cease as the lobby money rolls in. Cloning will then become a plaything for the rich. Forget medical revolutions for Joe Blow. I doubt you will see much of a "revolution of thought and mind" and a new evolution of mankind. Cloning will simply be another tool to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
A strange and scary idea for many, the technology is coming to the point now where we have to ask the question as to what is a human? When we genetically engineer our bodies with so many animal genes that we're no longer physically human, what are we? the posthuman. If we are no longer human we could easily create a slave race of mindless beings having nothing more than a chip linked up to the brain motor functions of a drone with no other remaining brain structures. Factories could pump these out at will, these beings would be genetically modified for function and would leave us as thinkers and philosophers as the greeks were (which was based on a involuntary slave economy). This species would be so heavily modified it would be unrecognizable as a human, you could program it with a computer and send instructions to its brain via radio LAN. You could link them up to a CAD program and have them build a building or whatever. They'd essentially be mindless quake bots. Link them up to a remote control car controller and have them run around the street. If they needed to eat or take a leak, theyd follow a series of procedures to accomplish it automatically without thought. These wouldnt be people theyd be biomechanical machines. And this WILL take place unless nanotech gets here first. With nanotechnology and biotechnology essentially everything becomes mere code.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
The thing is that we started to f*ck with our own evolution the day we invented medical technology. Medical technology has allowed bad genes to thrive thus causing low fertility (unheard of in native south american tribes), poor eyesight, down syndrome, sickle cell, hemophillia, need i go on? This is all our fault from using medical technology. The question of civilization is, can a civilization survive from the point of the conception of the medical field to the point they invent genetic engineering. I believe we have successfully pulled this bit off, or are very near so to doing it. The same may not be for other civilizations on distant planets. Perhaps they all nuked themselves during their '1950s' which is why noones contacted us.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
dont you all think fscking with mother nature is a no no?
:)
remember jurassic park!
Sensei
Sensei
Linuxnewbie.org home of the NHF's
1) Send the clone to the Bahamas while you go to WORK!!! Your boss will never suspect a thing!
2) Have your clone review your code after you write it, lending another set of eyes on the project. Guaranteed to cut efficiency in half.
3) Send your clone to family functions while you do the cool thing--sitting on IRC.
4) Now you can smell yourself in the mirror.
5) Technically, it's not cheating. It's with yourself.
-
Insofar as clones may/may not have shorter lifespans due to telomerase attrition ("shorter DNA"), there are two ways to look at it:
1) Telomerase attrition is a transient problem that will get fixed as the process is better understood. In that case, the question is moot.
2) The problem is fundamentally intractable in some way. In that case, we get (again) two options (well, at least two options -- it seems I'm as prone as any to the either/or fallacy):
2a) Bringing into life a human with a reduced lifespan is Fundamentally Wrong.
2b) Even an abbreviated existence is better than no existence at all.
Personally, I tend towards (2b) myself, and the Fundamental Wrongness of (2a) is itself motive-dependent (i.e., what if you had some arbitrarily defined Really Good Reason?); but the entire analysis does presuppose that the clones are being created for the same reason have children, i.e. reproduction/genetic imperative/egostroke.
Which is not necessarily the case -- the research/spare parts motivations have been bandied about quite a bit elsewhere on the thread, and (to my knowledge) no-one's mentioned that acephalic mice are being grown right now in labs, implying that acephalic feti are also within the realm of possibility. Just a brainstem for the autonomic functions, some basic infrastructure, and away we go. Gotta watch that muscular atrophy, though -- should be some way to stimulate muscular formation in the 'spare parts bin' to avoid having your leg replaced with a nasty, quasi-functional withered leg.
To return to your original question: Is it 'fair'? Depends on your reasons. Mostly yes, I think, but it's a eugenics question, like "if the gene doctor looks at your and your wife's genemaps and determines your children are 80% likely to be born (blind/legless/Your Horrible Malformation Here), are you going to breed anyway?"
Would you repeat the pregnancy/abortion cycle until you get an okay child, or just spin the wheel once and take your 1 in 5 chance? How is that morally/ethically different than repeating the pregnancy/abortion cycle to select gender, or other characteristics?
To hew back to my original take on the issue: some life is better than no life.
gomi
I don't think the question is settled, and I doubt that it ever will be. Many of the main heresies that arose in early Christianity had to do with trying to answer this question; no one found a solution that was both orthodox and an actual solution. The best run at it was the Gnostics, who decided that they couldn't salvage the idea of an all-good God and posited that the world was created by Satan when God wasn't looking!
The problem with your solution is that you assume that the dichotomy between "free to be bad" beings and automata is the only choice there is. Couldn't a good God have made us a little better than we are? Couldn't he have made us free to disobey but made us stronger-willed, more knowledgable, and more empathetic, so that it would never happen (like the Angels)? If you can imagine a world that's infinitesimally better than the one we live in, you have to deal with the Problem of Evil.
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow
Or, alternatively, imagine clone banks where you can go to pick the genes of your child when you can check out how these genes turned out in real people. "See, the type CX774976 has a very good body, but 56% of these develop mild depression around the age of 30... if you check out type DN8743992, it has no depression tendencies, but it's grade point average in high school tends to be noticeably lower, and of course they have to watch their diet or they'll become fat by middle age...".
Thanks, Kaa. That's something that I wanted to broach. It's an interesting topic, especially in light of the movie Gattica a couple of years back. click here for what I consider a accurate review of the movie. Here's another one. Chilling stuff, IMO. Chilling.
As I think has been said, It's not the science that's freightening... It's the application of it. (i.e. Just because we CAN do it doesn't mean we SHOULD do it!)
Geordon
It is by caffiene alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of java that thoughts acquire speed, hands acquire
Everyone has the right to believe in whatever god/gods/goddess/power/whatever they feel like.
This is one of the basic human rights, freedomof religion. I guess human rights would give someone
the right to believe whatever they want. Or not believe, if that is the case
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Indeed the bible offers a scale, and often a decent one. But there's other religious books too.
No reason why these would be less or more valid.
I for one will stick to my own beliefs,and I encourage you to do the same.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
We need to get rid of the religious disillusions that obviously is still hindering science. And find somebody with the guts to take it all the way and actually have a clone born. Cool, now all I got to do is get a blood sample from Sandra Bullock.
Sincerely,
Sinistre
but what makes you think that that a clone of Sandra Bullock would want to go out with you, any more than the original Sandra Bullock or any other woman for that matter?
First of all, for all you religious nuts that are worried how god feels about this, don't worry. I don't mind it that much.
I think however, this is a bad thing for the most part. Not for the "morol" implications but rather that it will put more of you shitty people on this already overpopulated planet. All the boneheads that can't knock up a girl get to pass on there inferior genetic code. And all the old bastards dying of cancer get new organs.
The only good thing about this is that I will get to pass on my superior genes because I have vowed never to stick myself in any of you lying bitches out there again. My son will also be a male and this will give him the y chromosome, which we all know makes it possible for humans to tell the truth.
All you got is lifetime. GO!!
Remember "A brave new world" ?
I'm sure governments will take advantage of this new technological development to start creating cloned soldiers or even other classes of citizens. Why not laborers (i.e. slaves) with limited intellect but tireless energy and total obedience?
One can only dream of the possibilities :-)
With the human genome project a mere year from completion, and with genetic engineering becoming so sophisticated, how long after human cloning before we started seeing geneered clones? Picture this: at age forty, you order a version of yourself with clear vision, perfect teeth and arteries, immunity to a variety of diseases, stronger bones, no vermiform appendix and:
If you are male:
If you are female:
In ten years, the brainless, accelerated-growth, pre-exercised, healthy young body is ready for your brain to be dropped on in. There you are, fifty, with not just any eighteen year-old's body, but your own, new, improved eighteen year-old's body. You could be your own Friday! Not only that, but by the time you're a physical thirty years old, you can start drawing Social Security, your pension and your 401(k), join the AARP and get a senior citizen's discount on just everything.
Just to throw a monkey wrench into things, if you're male, chances are they could excise the Y chromosome, extrapolate a new X chromosome from the one you got from your Mom, and you could live your life over again as a woman!
Sound fun? Order yours today!
--
This is not my sandwich.