I confess that I take anti-cloning arguments personally. Not only do they insult the identical twin sons I already have; they insult a son I hope I live to meet. Yes, I wish to clone myself and raise the baby as my son. Seriously. I want to experience the sublime bond I'm sure we'd share. I'm confident that he'd be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised by me. I'm not pushing others to clone themselves. I'm not asking anyone else to pay for my dream. I just want government to leave me and the cloning business alone. Is that too much to ask?
The link is here and he is asking whether he should cut that paragraph from his forthcoming book on why people should have more children. If you don't like his proposal for a cloned son, I will ask why you think your preferred degree of genetic similarity — between you and your next kid — is right and Bryan's is wrong.
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I don’t concede that it is necessary to ‘argue against’ Caplan’s wish to have a clone in order not to like it. To whatever extent it’s Bryan Caplan’s right to clone himself, it’s my right to find it, and the desire to do so, hella creepy.
ok, one other thing comes come to mind.
this is kind of disgusting, but here it is:
if he cloned himself and raised his clone with someone whom he was sexually involved, and if at least some sexual cues and preferences are inherited, why wouldn’t that person be inclined to have sexual relations with the clone and vice versa?
isn’t that enough reason to stay away from this?
“Frankly, I don’t think the anti-cloners really believe their own arguments. Suppose my cloned son actually existed. If he met you in real life and quoted your words back to you, would you stand by what you wrote?”
The part about how bad people might use their clones to extend their own life? Yup.
I sorta figure you’re not one of them, but of course, that’s an unverified working theory. ;->
My first reaction was the “natural selection” argument, i.e. that this would effectively stop evolution, therefore decrease probability that the species survives.
However, in reality, as long as a significant proportion of the population is reproducing traditionally, shouldn’t we be ok? (i.e. the clones would die off anyway, given their lack of evolution).
The real question is why Bryan would put his descendants at a genetic disadvantage, which they must surely be, given that genetic diversity was withheld.
If a desire for genetic similarity with your kids is evidence of some kind of unhealthy narcissism, what can we say about the large number of infertile couples who choose to have fertility treatments rather than to adopt?
Some of Steve Sailer’s points, above, are well-taken. But they apply almost as strongly to biological vs adoptive kids as to clones, and they go both directions. For example, my oldest son is amazingly similar to me in all kinds of ways, presumably through some combination of similar genes, assortive mating, and being raised by me and my wife. This means that I have to watch out not to leave stuff out of his upbringing that he needs (and I needed) but don’t find all that much fun or interesting–he won’t push for most of those things, since he also usually doesn’t find them so interesting. But it also means that there are times where he’s having some problem, and I just *get* it, in ways my wife doesn’t.
I’m not sure whether the overlap is ultimately more good or more bad, but I am pretty sure the answer isn’t straightforward.
I agree with the first comment. My wife is far and away better than me in almost every respect and I think I would be robbing my offspring if I didn’t give them access to her genes.
Another reason I wouldn’t do it is because it’s far better for children to be raised in a 2-parent, mixed gender home. By simply cloning myself and raising the child alone, they wouldn’t get that benefit.
However, I wouldn’t force my preference on Bryan. And I certainly don’t think it’s an ethical issue. Anything that can be done to help parents who struggle to have children of their own is a good thing, in my book.
I wouldn’t want to raise a clone of myself, because I am almost certainly a carrier for a variety of very annoying genetic diseases that run in my family.
It’s lucky, in fact, that I’m gay, because if I were straight I would have to wonder about the ethics of passing on a hearing impairment, celiac disease, and the defective teeth I inherited from my mother.
Let my ideas propagate. Let my genes die off, and good riddance to them.
Too bad. I used to like Caplan. Now I know he’s a narcissistic creep.
I like Prof. Caplan’s ambition, and who would a father or mother care for more than literally their own clone? But in reality, even if humans could do this reliably now, your clone in this context would still be your biological child however its constiutent parts were constituted and brought into this world.
A clone is you only in genetic terms, and not in terms of life experiences. That’s what’s going on in your own private wetware, and no one else can experience that in quite the same way. Two biological twins (I’m presuming the same holds true with identical triplets and quadruplets) can experience emotions similarly, but those emotions will never be identically felt even by twins. And the loss of one child even when that child’s a twin doesn’t make a family grieve any less at the terrible loss.
Biological twins are supposed to have strong psychological bonds because of their genetic connection to each other, but having a clone of your own to raise as your child still isn’t really comparable to growing up with a twin sibling. It’s you rearing a younger, genetically identical version of you. That version of you will always be separate and never a true twin in the sense of time’s arrow and shared life experiences.
Within the next 20 years, we may opt for cloning as the population naturally reduces if governments cannot develop successful economic incentives to persuade familes to have bigger families to support having a sufficiently large population of adults to tax to pay for Social Security and other retiree-focused benefits. Cloning may become a necessity.
And the first cloning, I suspect, will just be to fix shortages of replacement organs for the human body. We’ll clone your heart or kidney, and replace the old with the new, so you don’t have to take immune system-compromising implant rejection suppression drugs to receive an implant.
Deliberately creating a human being for the purpose of having a relationship with it is creepy – especially at a time when we can expect the child to will grow up to live their life making more difficult choices than the ones we have had to make. While I understand the attraction of a “projet de famille,” it’s not like there’s a shortage of human beings to have relationships with. This applies no matter how the new human being is brought into existence or who it is genetically similar to.
Anyone who thinks cloning is desirable is signalling that they are misguided about the nature of parenthood. Embarking on parenthood means being willing to embrace uncontrollable, unforeseen outcomes. Any child might be born disabled, or become disabled at some later point. The ability to accept some unpredictability in the genetic makeup of the child – the usual knowledge of who is contributing to it with uncertainty about what exactly is going to be mixed and matched – could be thought to be demonstrating a minimum amount of the flexibility required to be an effective parent.
Given the strong and widespread ick response, I’m not sure legal restrictions are necessary, but I don’t think they would impose undue hardship either. So I don’t have strong opinions about legislation in this area.
Considering that all successfully cloned mammal species to date have suffered very high rates of maternal death, miscarriages, disabling birth defects, and significantly reduced life expectancies, I think Bryan is seriously limiting the liberty of both the woman who carries the clone, and the clone itself.
I am fully serious when I say that I would not like to have myself as a father. And that by itself makes me think that I wouldn’t like to have myself as a son.
Wanting to clone oneself is no more arrogant than the desire to produce offspring naturally. By nature alone we are arrogant in the desire to procreate as well as our embedded fear of death which by design ensures our survival as a species.
Ethics and morality are not natural, as in they occur due to the advanced thought process capable of humans, not because nature decided we should develop them, but are a by-product of nature deciding we should be capable of higher thought function. Whether it is either of those things to clone or not to clone, does not matter.
Someone said they themselves would not like to be raised by themselves and thus felt they would not like to raise themselves and are basically saying that they feel they would not make a good parent in any circumstance whether the child be cloned or produced naturally.
Genetic engineering of a human and believing said human would be the same as the donor is preposterous for several reasons. Genetically the human would be the same and so what if it is. Its environment and experiences from the date of conception would never be identical, ie. mothers womb environment, diet, emotional stimuli, family dynamic, home environment, etc. If Bryan would start out hoping for a clone to have the same personality, emotional response, problem solving ability, interpersonal relationship ability, etc etc., I am afraid he would be sadly mistaken and disappointed with the outcome. You would find this clone to age and mature in its own unique way as we all do and be something completely similar, but different in however many ways a person can be measured.
I think that’s a fine idea. Note that there is a lot of scientifically valid evidence that points at the birth mother (and the hormonal influence she exercises during the growth period of the baby) playing a significant role in the child’s development (as Robert Sapolsky points out, the genes are the blueprint, the rest is done by the environment), so the similarities between Bryan and his clone would probably suprisingly few.
To counter the genetic diversity argument – evaluating the fitness of a gaggle of clones of the same geneset and using that to determine sexual reproduction likelihood would result in better genes in the population a few generations down the road by averaging out the influence of the individuals environment and would therefore increase overall fitness.
Wow, there were lots of great insightful comments here!
It’s crazy that we should have to justify prohibiting cloning, rather than making would-be cloners justify cloning. There is no need to clone anyone, no right to clone. It’s a waste of energy and money and the least amount of prudence calls for us to prohibit it now, in case there might be any risks or flaws or downsides to allowing it. Then, he can try to argue why we should let him clone himself, and we can tell him to justify the waste of energy.
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