From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri May 03 2002 - 13:09:13 MDT
Edmund Grech wrote:
>
> Not at all - this statement niether supports nor condemns a single vs couple
> relationship. Only that reproductive cloning would be desirable to someone
> who didn't have a partner, and didn't want annonymous artificial
> insemination; if they had either the former, or were prepared for the
> latter, then they would have no need to resort to cloning is all I'm saying.
Well, wait just a moment here. There are possible reasons to want to clone,
as such, regardless of whether there's another way. All of these reasons
have to do with wanting a living person who's as similar as possible to a
previous organism - not maximally similar, of course, because environmental
differences will always intertwine with the genetic similarities; just "as
similar as possible". In the pre-cloning era you could only get a maximum
of 50% genetic similarity; when cloning is safe (it isn't now) it will be
possible to get 100% genetic similarity. This is not the total
one-mind-in-two-bodies similarity portrayed by a foolish and uninformed
media; it's just a greater degree of similarity than was previously
possible. Suppose a woman wants to raise a child that is as bright as
possible. She could get a Nobel Prize winner's gamete from a sperm bank.
Or - in the future - she could clone a Nobel Prize winner. This doesn't
guarantee her child will win the Nobel Prize, but it does mean that the
"average intelligence of the parents" will be higher and that the expected
intelligence of the child will be higher.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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