From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Dec 30 2002 - 17:27:31 MST
Ron writes
>> While I think that it's frequently a bad idea for
>> money to be taken from citizens unnecessarily,
>> why does the idea of government involvement [in
>> cloning] worry you so much?
>
> Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Putin. Hitler tried a breeding program in
> lieu of cloning. Putin according to the news just last week was offering
> incentives for babies. If cloning is available a dictator somewhere will
> think of breeding the perfect soldier.
I don't think that the bottleneck is the genetic identity
of the soldier. Old-fashioned breeding methods would
suffice perfectly for creating just the kind of soldier
you'd want. Besides that, in most endeavors people's
idiosyncrasies complement each other on the battlefield
as they do in an economy: a platoon of identical soldiers
would probably be less efficient.
Putin is worried about declining Russian fertility, that's
all.
Hmm. Now if we had a few clones of Von Neumann??? Perhaps
you are on to something here!
Lee
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