Well. I don’t see the point of this study, but I suppose there are people who need to be clubbed about the head with the obvious who would be well-served by reading it. It’s a study to determine whether clones would have separate identities.
Umm, yeah?
They determined this by interviewing twins, who are clones of one another.
OK, yes?
From these findings the scientists said they could assume a clone would probably not feel their individuality was compromised by sharing genes with someone else; that their relationship with their co-clone was a blessing; and their uniqueness was not a negative thing.
That’s a relief. We can stop worrying about the clone armies full of self-loathing bodies with a single mind between them, I guess. I wonder if they also pursued the question of why, in any pair of twins, one individual gets all the good qualities, and the other is always pure evil?
Never mind. Try googling “soul” and “clone”—there are way too many people in the world who take that worry seriously. Maybe this was a necessary study after all.
Well, duh.
As a counterexample, there is always PsmIth.
” I wonder if they also pursued the question of why, in any pair of twins, one individual gets all the good qualities, and the other is always pure evil?”
When they do they will find that it’s connected to the goatee gene and the dark hair gene!
Another “Well, duh” from me — identicals can have (so I’ve heard) some neat affinities, but I don’t recall there ever being any serious question that they experienced themselves as individuals.
However, I bet it would really suck to have a genetic twin who was decades older than you, who had created you for the purpose of achieving some kind of pseudo-immortality, and was determined that you would pick up exactly where they left off and somehow “continue” their life. If human cloning ever goes mainstream, someone will probably try it (after all, enough parents try it already, with kids who are only one-half genetically similar to themselves).
I wonder if they also pursued the question of why, in any pair of twins, one individual gets all the good qualities, and the other is always pure evil?
In some traditional cultures (so I’ve heard), twin babies are believed to consist of the “real” person, and a demonic fake. The local shaman’s job is to determined which is which, and the “fake” is then killed.
I too found it a study in the obvious, but I recall a certain religious coworker from a few years ago who was convinced clones would not have souls.
I guess the upshot then is that good Christians would be free to enslave them, while we freethinking types fight for their rights.
Ain’t that always the way…?
Anyone else out there wondering how it was possible for God to put two different souls in the exact same person?
And is anyone else thinking that that was what they were testing here?
In the late David Feintuch’s Seafort series, the main character is a clone of his “father”, who is a brutally strict Welsh protestant. I always figured he was cloned because his father didn’t want to risk committing the sin of lust.
Though it seems laughable now, the same folks who think clones will be soulless golems were up in arms about IVF babies for the same reason when IVF first came into the news.
Now if only those same studies will clue in the oblivious to the fact that clones don’t spring forth as full-blown adults, so the (gasp! Oh, no!) “army of Hitlers” stops being brought up as an “argument” against cloning, it would be really nice.
CJ Cherryh’s “Cyteen” was a nice examination of the difficulty of trying to fully reproduce a person via a clone.
What? They won’t be? There goes World Domination Plan #78249. Oh, well.
According to Dr. Hibbert, it is a scientific fact that the left twin is always the evil one. But he is a Republican, perhaps that is a biased conclusion.
I suppose some things just aren’t as obvious as I’d like them to be.
Wait. This seems to imply that the act of cloning creates a soul.
Oh. Oh. Oh. I’ve got it. Every human cell has a soul. This is why every fertilized egg has a soul, and can’t be aborted. And when it splits each twin has a soul. And this is why a clone would have a soul also.
This is my GUT of pro-life thinking.
I wonder if they also pursued the question of why, in any pair of twins, one individual gets all the good qualities, and the other is always pure evil?
And then there’s the whole matter versus anti-matter thing. Does anti-matter like family values? When matter and anti-matter twins meet, do they throw a party? Those are questions for the physicists, I think.
However, I bet it would really suck to have a genetic twin who was decades older than you, who had created you for the purpose of achieving some kind of pseudo-immortality, and was determined that you would pick up exactly where they left off and somehow “continue” their life.
Oh, I’m sure that by the end of the episode everything will work out. The only real long term danger is that your nose spent too much time smushed up against the side of the cloning tank.
A growing number of scientists who believe that the Recapitulation Theory cannot explain everything have demonstrated that identical twins have exactly 1/2 soul.
Well, as a bonus, it will piss of the Catholic (“Clones don’t have souls”) church.
Brian: You are all individuals.
Crowd: We are all individuals.
From the article:
But [the researchers] also emphasized twins would differ from clones because they are born at the same time, whereas clones would differ in age.
… so, clones would be even less alike than identical twins, since twins share the same genetic makeup and a similar environment.
I’m with PZ – I don’t really see the point of the study. But can I have an army of clones anyway?
I’m afraid they are STILL going on about cloning being “evil”, and clones being soul-less, and it should be stopped.
i have heard this at least twice, on BBC radio, in the past year.
And BOTH times, a scientist, or scientofically-educated person has asked – “What about identical twins?”
And they either said “Thats’ different” – and been unable to explain how, when challenged,
OR
Have gone on about “artificial cloning” – and have been challenged – in what way is it different (again) anf got a load of BS and waffle.
They will, of course continue to lie.
They must do so, or their religious blackmail might not work, you see ….
Clearly, clones don’t have souls. If they did that would mean that scientists created those souls! In a test tube! And only God can create souls. So that would make man God. Obviously such hubris is to be rejected out of hand
So the next question is: how can we distinguish between people with and without souls? Not by observation and experimentation (those pesky scientists, always wanting to catch God in a buttfly net!), it seems.
My limited mind can only assume that the soul is irrelevant, if we can’t distinguish between someone with a soul and someone without. But I’m sure that there are theologians working on that very issue as we speak.
Of course, having no soul, clones would never have to worry about being sent to Hell (Just east of Trondheim), and so would be free to murder and rape with no consequences whatsoever, just as those evil, satanic athiests are. Isn’t this enough reason, by itself, to make cloning illegal?
Oh, I love Cyteen, and Downbelow Station and that whole series — of course, it’s all about how the clones actually do have individuality that has to be suppressed by intensive tape learning and conditioning (and 40,000 in Gehenna is about what happens when you strip them of that conditioning.)
Individual uniqueness is something that we all have in common.
Studies show identical twins raised apart are less different.
Would they feel better if, when cloning, a few transcription errors are thrown in like a spice? And what about the “god” gene?
Something like this?
Holden: You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down…
Leon: What one?
Holden: What?
Leon: What desert?
Holden: It doesn’t make any difference what desert, it’s completely hypothetical.
My mother has an identical twin sister, and she was really surprised when I remarked to her one day that they had the same DNA. She found this very hard to believe since that would make them “clones” and pop culture says clones are much more alike than her and her sister.
Thus a study like this is silly, but to the unwashed masses these results are probably pretty surprising.
Semi-random note: mythologies about twins have a deep resonance in folk cultures, and apparently also in high culture in France: see, e.g. Michel Tournier’s classic GEMINI, praised by such as Jean Genet and Salmon Rushdie. Tournier is generally a good read, but I’ve not yet got to reading this.
As usual, objective research on twins such as the Minnesota Twins Project is much less generally resonant. And as ‘drew’ pointed out in another thread, Minnesota’s research was originally motivated by eugenics sympathies, which lead invariably to National Socialism. Except when they don’t, as in the U.K. and (so far) the U.S.
Minnesota Twins Project? Er … :)
Anyway, all this stuff about souls is amusing in the light of the almost diametric opposite view of the Dalai Lama, who seems to think that a sufficiently complex robot or computer will suddenly be ensouled.
> When matter and anti-matter twins meet, do they throw a party?
Well, the fireworks are to *die* for.
I’ve read that traditional (at least hunter-gatherer) attitudes have a root in practicality, it being hard to carry and nurse two babies at once, so you kill one of them. An example of how religious beliefs can sometimes be adaptive in origin, even without congruence with reality.
That is most peculiar. I would be very interested in seeing the grant proposal that was submitted for this research. I wonder whether these guys were worried about indentity crises in cloned sheep, cattle, dogs and cats or whether ther ultimate justification was the prospect of cloning human beings. If so, I guess it’s safe now to go ahead…..
Same here…don’t see the point to this study. Sounds as though someone milked a few buzzwords (cloning, bioethics) for funding and/or a publication.
Rick: Funny you should mention that. That’s one of my favorite movie scenes, and my favorite line of it is Holden’s “I mean you’re not helping. Why is that, Leon?” He delivers that line with an arrogant cruelty, like twisting a knife. He’s doing his job too well, and enjoying it too much.
And as a further rambling, one of my biggest irritations with the movie is the re-recorded dialogue of that secene they use throughout the rest of the film. Annoys me.
Writen my rrt: ‘That’s one of my favorite movie scenes, and my favorite line of it is Holden’s “I mean you’re not helping. Why is that, Leon?”‘
It’s a great sequence in the book too. While I find much of P.K. Dick to be overly introspective and reality warping, _Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_Sheep?_ is just as good as the movie.
I’ll throw in another recommendation for _Cyteen_ also. Best treatment I’ve ever read of how a person is formed by a combination of their genetics and their environment. I should re-read that again. And Scott de B. I would have never made the Foglio connection without your comment, Heh!
Cheers,
-Flex
Heh, it’s actually Minnesota Twin Family Study – for very good reasons as you hinted.
It can be done, but it’s difficult. It involves turning the person into a vampire, a gypsy curse, love, and a willingness to sacrifice a perfectly good actress to the story. And lots of teen-female-superhero stage combat.
Well c’mon, the fundies get to ignore the distinction between fiction and reality. They shouldn’t get all the fun.
Hey, I’m the evil twin, right?
Which is why the argument that cloning would carry the danger of people trying to force clones into specific careers and lifestyles doesn’t strike me as a very strong one. Parents already do this. Not all parents, of course, but quite a few. Would cloning really make it any worse?
Maybe we can develop some kind of Voight-Kampff test to determine whether someone is a clone or not.
You left out the Buffy-mating. That part gets you a stampede of volunteers willing to try the experiment.
Hmmm. I think chin-whiskers are the definitive criterion, and the last photo I have of you shows a naked chin. Sorry, old man, you must be the good one, so you’re going to have to get your act together and fly straight. Me, I’m off to the bar to pick up a few bimbos and frolic the night away.
Frankly, I always thought the whole Spike-with-a-chip bit was a fascinating take on moral development (although of course, this turns out to be rather different from having a soul . . .
And in terms of twinning, don’t forget poor Xander, when he got split . . .
“I’ve read that traditional (at least hunter-gatherer) attitudes have a root in practicality, it being hard to carry and nurse two babies at once, so you kill one of them. An example of how religious beliefs can sometimes be adaptive in origin . . .”
Blind memetic evolution?
Who cares about sheep? The bad stuff happens when they start cloning bacteria! There will be an evil army of identical bacteria swarming over the Earth, feeding and multiplying as they go!
What’s that you say? Do that already, you say? How interesting…
This line of argument requires total acceptance of the ridiculous assumption that non-cloned people have souls to start with.
The extreme version of this involves a brain transplant (see Brothers in Arms, another good SF book on the subject). It’s frighteningly plausible that a significant number of people would prefer to murder a close relative they had never met in order to delay their own deaths. (This is forbidden on any civilized planet, but not all planets are equally civilized.)
As far as I know, no work of SF published after Cyteen has failed to grasp the point that clones are individuals with minds of their own (provided of course that they belong to a species with minds and individuality); even Attack of the Clones – not otherwise known for its attention to logic and consistency – mentions that the clones are brainwashed for years to achieve uniformity.
As usual, the rest of the world hasn’t quite caught up with the SF community yet. We’re used to that. :)
Um, I’m no scientist–hell, let’s face it, I’m just a mouth breather, not fit to comment amongst such august company–but has anyone considered perhaps that people who worry that, oh let’s say, Hitler’s clone would grow up to actually be Hitler aren’t really the kinds of folks who are going to put a lot of stock in what a bunch of scientists have to say?
After all, if it weren’t for scientists we wouldn’t have to worry about all those Hitler clones running around. I’m just saying.
“After all, if it weren’t for scientists we wouldn’t have to worry about all those Hitler clones running around. I’m just saying.”
Oooh, I’m *so* worried!
Well, if clones don’t have souls, and we can clone Hitler, does that mean that it’s not really murder if you kill Hitler’s clone?
I can think of a few thousand ways I’d like to slaughter that particular asshat.
Now I want to write a story about somebody cloning Hitler and giving the infant to a nice Jewish professorial couple to raise and him turning out to be a shy, polite, second-generation acedemic. And then they tell him.
Chin-whiskers mean one is being EVIL?
Oh goody, now I can go out and ravish all the nubile females ….
For explanation see ….
http://www.filk.co.uk/chingford/photos/lvenice2.jpg
and
http://www.filk.co.uk/chingford/photos/lvenice1.jpg
I’m the one rign=ht-centre, with the serious beard ….
I’m an identical twin. The only downside to it is that EVERYONE I meet that finds this out asks the exact same questions: “If I hit you, can your brother feel it? Did you ever switch places and mess with your teachers? Blah blah blah, etc.”
Seems to me we already have an army of clones.
NBarnes: I’m sure it has been done. :) Not that should discourage you, though.
“Anyway, all this stuff about souls is amusing in the light of the almost diametric opposite view of the Dalai Lama, who seems to think that a sufficiently complex robot or computer will suddenly be ensouled.”
I don’t know anything about the Dalai Lama’s views on ensoulment, but if I had to guess I’d say that he probably believes that such ensoulment would be *graudual* not sudden, and preportional to the intelligence and capability of the program. “Suddenly” seems both dismissive and caricaturish.
Terry – the stupid questions aren’t limited to identical twins. I have twin brothers. They’re fraternal. They look nothing alike. I understood the question when they were toddlers (all little kids kind of look alike), but now they’re teenagers, and they always get the same question, from people standing right in front of them, looking right at them, when the person finds out they’re twins: “Are you identical?”