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Maciamo wrote:Did I miss something ?
Maciamo wrote:What is your opinion about cloning ?
Maciamo wrote:Personally, I don't see any problem with cloning.
Maciamo wrote:As in my opinion humans are no more than more intelligent animals, human and animal or plant cloning should not be seen differently.
Maciamo wrote:There has been sheep or other animals cloned years ago, but the population has accepted it.
Maciamo wrote:What's the difference with humans.
Maciamo wrote:I hear people saying its dangerous. Why ? Why human clones are more dangerous than animal's ?
Maciamo wrote:Lots of people overreact because they are affraid of what they don't know. If the society had decided to ban planes because humans were not supposed to fly, where would we be now ?
Maciamo wrote:Furthermore, clones have always existed naturally]
Not the same thing. You are arguing that the results justify the means: on one hand, you end up with two beings that share the original code from the same fertilized egg, and on the other you have a being that has the same genetic code as someone else.Maciamo wrote:In vitro reproduction is praised by some for giving the opportunity to infertile couples to have a baby]
See above.Maciamo wrote:Genetically modified food is readily available, but the same people that defend it now want to ban human cloning.
Not exactly the same people. I'm not from Europe, but I thought that the anti "Frankenfood" movement was sweeping rural areas of France (much to the chagrin of the American engineered-food conglomerates)Maciamo wrote:The only reason behind this must be religious, not rational or scientific
No, it's prudent caution: what happens when genetically engineered seed enters the general population? Could it push out non-engineered foods? What are the consequences to the ecosystem when alien elements (such as genetically engineered foods) start occupying parts of the food chain?Maciamo wrote:Once we have started muddling with DNA, be it that of a plant, a cat or a human, the most important ethic step was taken.
So, there's no turning back? We might as well continue on the downwards spiral?Maciamo wrote:Relatively few people would argue that GM food is morally condemnable (they just refrain from eating it if they feel affraid).
It's not physically dangerous (if you discount the horrifying spectre of deformed failures or the psychological damage to the scientific staff dealing with their Frankenstein mistakes),
but legally dangerous. Would the legal rights of clones be equal to non-clones (and that includes so-called "test tube" babies, because artificial insemination only alters the location of fertilization, not the entire process), or would we have created a new class of disposable humans?
No, the population did not "accept [animal cloning]".
That logic doesn't make any sense to me. Are you equating plants and animals on the basis of Materialism?
Maciamo wrote:I'll try and answer that.
Why would they make disformed humans ?
but legally dangerous. Would the legal rights of clones be equal to non-clones (and that includes so-called "test tube" babies, because artificial insemination only alters the location of fertilization, not the entire process), or would we have created a new class of disposable humans?
Artificial insemination is the same as natural fertilization (as I stated above). Cloning? I can't imagine the problems to our legal framework if cloned humans are permitted the same legal rights as the rest of us... so, if you are cloned, which "Maciamo" is the real one? The DNA is the same, so that kind of testing is out...Maciamo wrote:I can't believe that people think like you ! Of course clones or in virto fertilised ("test-tube") babies should have the same legal rights as anyone else.
Maciamo wrote:That's a basic human right.
Maciamo wrote:Well. men invented human rights (not so long ago), but these philosopher (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot...) who have come with the idea were atheist or deist, not Christians.
Maciamo wrote:Religion can be a vicious thing. Christians and Jewish at least feel they have some kind of supernatural reason of existence (a soul, made by God) or are superior to any other lifekind.
Maciamo wrote:That is why they don't see any problem with destryoing their environment, except the moral one of preserving God's creation.
Maciamo wrote:Anyway that is years since the first animal clone was born and I almost never hear of protest or demonstration to make it illegal. So that means, people have accepted it in some way.
Maciamo wrote:Why would they make disformed humans ?
Maciamo wrote:This is genetical engireering, not cloning. I am not an expert, so I could be mistaken, but inmy understanding, cloning is just taking someone's DNA and creating cells or a baby from it.
Maciamo wrote:but legally dangerous. Would the legal rights of clones be equal to non-clones (and that includes so-called "test tube" babies, because artificial insemination only alters the location of fertilization, not the entire process), or would we have created a new class of disposable humans?
I can't believe that people think like you ! Of course clones or in virto fertilised ("test-tube") babies should have the same legal rights as anyone else. That's a basic human right.
Maciamo wrote:Therefore, I am almost convinced that if you cloned a Hitler or Einstein, the clone, raised in a different world, the former would not become a dictator or racist, and the latter probably not a reknown genius (but possibly a mathemtician or scientist).
cstaylor wrote:That logic doesn't make any sense to me. Are you equating plants and animals on the basis of Materialism?
Maciamo wrote:Yes. As I said I am an Atheist (philosophically convinced), so I don't see how you could consider humans if not animals (just a question of vocabulary maybe).
I can't imagine the problems to our legal framework if cloned humans are permitted the same legal rights as the rest of us... so, if you are cloned, which "Maciamo" is the real one? The DNA is the same, so that kind of testing is out...
Human is the appropriate word here. If you accept that cloned homo sapiens are "human" and deserve "rights", then mistakes made by cloning scientists should be considered crimes against humanity, because they (whether they intended to or not) will make mistakes, and some of those mistakes will live a short, tortured existence.
You still haven't answered my question about the necessity for reproductive human cloning. Why do we need frankenbabies?
cstaylor wrote:Just to make sure we're talking the same thing: Materialism is that category of philosophy that disregards any notion of spirit, assuming that all things can be explained as physical, chemical, and electrical reactions. To a Materialist, man's ability to build tools, form commerce, raise food instead of gathering it, create civilizations, languages, art, and technology can all be explained through the physical complexity of the human brain and its various electro-chemical responses.
So, when I asked you if you are equating men, lesser animals, and plants on the basis of Materialism, I was asking you if you believed that humans should be treated like animals or plants, or in other words, as a means to an end. Some notable people in history fall into one category or another of Materialists, four of the most (in)famous of the 20th century being Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.
They're 10-year-old identical twins. So, just like a clone and its progenitor, they have identical genes.
They do look alike; even teachers mix them up. But Noel is about five pounds lighter than Holly. Noel has pierced ears; Holly isn't interested.
Noel is the more mechanically minded and ``definitely more of a go-getter,'' says their mother, Mary. Holly is ``more laid-back, she's more the peacemaker.''
[...]
But even identical twins are influenced by nongenetic factors -- starting with the womb and extending to parents, friends, opportunities in life, chance occurrences -- that influence who we are.
Since a clone and its progenitor would be born into different families at different times, these nongenetic factors could be expected to be more powerful.
[...]
Studies show that, in general, the correlation between identical twins is strong for height, less strong for IQ, lesser still for weight and then personality, Plomin said.
For all their differences, ``identical twins are more identical than clones will ever be''
Andocrates wrote:The idea that someday a doctor could grow me a new organ is worth the moral qualms.
Maciamo wrote:Not surprising that Japanese make up a third of the sect.
Dr. Jacques Cohen, the scientific director of assisted reproduction at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J., said he that if he did not know about the difficulty researchers had trying to clone monkeys, he would have thought that humans would be easy to clone because fertility experts have spent years perfecting techniques to handle human eggs in the laboratory and to grow human embryos for a few days in a lab. But the monkey work, he said, gave him pause.
Dr. Dominko, one of the principle researchers trying to clone monkeys, spent three years, and made more than 300 attempts, to no avail. Working at the Oregon Primate Research Center, at a well-financed laboratory, she and her colleagues never got a single pregnancy. Instead, the cloning efforts produced grotesquely abnormal embryos, some with cells with no chromosomes, some with multiple nuclei, including one cell had nine nuclei. She called the embryos her "gallery of horrors.
Maciamo wrote:For some reason Materialism has a bad image among the masses.
Maciamo wrote:However there are lots of famous and very honorable Materialists, starting from Democritus (460 - 370 BC). For example, D. Diderot, D. Hume, F. Nietsche, C.Darwin, J.P. Sarte... You could even add Spinoza (actually pantheist, but that's hardly a difference of vocabulary) and Bertrand Russel. Let's say there philosophy is not at all incompatible with mine.
Earlier this year, Dr Antinori predicted that he would complete the first human cloning operation within 18 months.
He shot to prominence in 1994 when he helped a 63-year-old woman to have a baby by implanting a donor's fertilised egg in her uterus, making her the oldest known women in the world to give birth.
Maciamo wrote:I am not convinced, because an embryo always look monstruous. What's more they were very young embryo, so it's not more criminal than aborting a baby.
Dolly the cloned sheep has arthritis according to one of the scientists involved in her creation.
Professor Ian Wilmut, a member of the team at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, said the condition may have arisen because of genetic defects caused by the cloning process.
If you are oversensitive, don't put your noses in everything that is medical or biological. It's the way life is.
cstaylor wrote:Maciamo wrote:For some reason Materialism has a bad image among the masses.
For very good reasons (as the people I listed before were a plague on the 20th century)
Maciamo wrote:However there are lots of famous and very honorable Materialists, starting from Democritus (460 - 370 BC). For example, D. Diderot, D. Hume, F. Nietsche, C.Darwin, J.P. Sarte... You could even add Spinoza (actually pantheist, but that's hardly a difference of vocabulary) and Bertrand Russel. Let's say there philosophy is not at all incompatible with mine.
Could you list for me a single materialist that has held power over others and has not committed some atrocity? Kant got it right over 300 years ago when he refuted the materialist notion that humans, like animals, can be a means to an end.
Let me state this clearly: if we choose to go down the road of reproductive human cloning, nothing but the complete debasement of humanity will come of it. You will have created an endless human resource, a second class of disposable humanity that will forever change the landscape of our world. In a future with reproductive cloning, the continuation of human life on this planet will be removed from the hands of individual people like you and me and placed squarely into the hands of those in power.
" wrote:Here you go: Cloned sheep Dolly has arthritisDolly the cloned sheep has arthritis according to one of the scientists involved in her creation.
Professor Ian Wilmut, a member of the team at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, said the condition may have arisen because of genetic defects caused by the cloning process.If you are oversensitive, don't put your noses in everything that is medical or biological. It's the way life is.
I hope you are kidding ! Arthritis ! Lot's of people have that. And so what ? It's not even proven that it's for genetical reasons.An important question: where is the money coming from that funds this expensive research and development? And I mean besides the wackos from Canada...
As the controversy has heated up with the claim of the first human clone, the word cloning has come to mean, in the public's mind, the use of somatic cell nuclear transfer for artificial, asexual reproduction; to make a biologic copy of an existing organism. Scientists themselves often use the word "cloning" casually to refer to any use of somatic cell nuclear transfer. But elsewhere in science, cloning refers to outcome rather than process: it denotes replication of some biologic entity — perhaps an organism, but perhaps only one cell, or perhaps just a stretch of DNA. This reproduction might involve somatic cell nuclear transfer, or it might use some other technology.
Maciamo wrote:I don't care, most of the research is made in the US and I am not American. hat's more if you live in Japan, that's not a problem for you either.
Maciamo wrote:I guess the US government spends much more money in defence and armement than in cloning.
Maciamo wrote:Sheep clones with arthritis at age 5 and a half (probably old for a ewe) isn't that bad...
Maciamo wrote:Once again, you react like if you were living in a totalitarian country like the former USSR or China.
Maciamo wrote:In a democratic country (not sure that exist at the moment, maybe Switzerland, Luxembourg and other small European countries), politicians get their power from the people and lose it when they don't want then anymore.
Maciamo wrote:As simple as that. Then you should try to imagine (I know it's hard) what people would like to clone that might endanger human society.
Well, I won't be alive to see the day when they mass produce clones (knock on wood), but I would think that if you could mass-produce people, brain-washing them as good little workers wouldn't be far off.Maciamo wrote:A clone is just a normal person. Education is dangerous if in the wrong hands and left unchecked (brainwashing, like in sects...), but not cloning.
Maciamo wrote:It's impossible to create superhumans.
Maciamo wrote:Even a clone of Hitler would not become like him because he is not born at the same time and place.
Maciamo wrote:No politician could change the face of the world without the support of its population. Even a despot. Despot usually end up assassinated if they haven't got support.
Maciamo wrote:In democratic societies (don't take China as an example), people would make revolution if the government was trying to become totalitarian.
cstaylor wrote:Maciamo wrote:I guess the US government spends much more money in defence and armement than in cloning.
Don't see how that's relevant to this discussion.
You still haven't answered my question about why we need reproductive cloning (other than the fallacious argument about people who don't want to adopt), nor what the effects of artificially produced humanity will be for everyone else. Do you really want to see the future of humanity taken out of our hands and given to scientists and politicians? Ever read Brave New World?
cstaylor wrote:Maciamo wrote:Once again, you react like if you were living in a totalitarian country like the former USSR or China.
Even in the democratic nations of Western Europe you have labor disputes. Now, with man-made humanity, who needs to argue with the disposessed: just replace them with clones.
Maciamo wrote:In a democratic country (not sure that exist at the moment, maybe Switzerland, Luxembourg and other small European countries), politicians get their power from the people and lose it when they don't want then anymore.
Maciamo wrote:As simple as that. Then you should try to imagine (I know it's hard) what people would like to clone that might endanger human society.
Well, I won't be alive to see the day when they mass produce clones (knock on wood), but I would think that if you could mass-produce people, brain-washing them as good little workers wouldn't be far off.Maciamo wrote:A clone is just a normal person. Education is dangerous if in the wrong hands and left unchecked (brainwashing, like in sects...), but not cloning.
" wrote:It's impossible to create superhumans.
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