Comment & Debate
Gregory Pence. “The Top Ten Myths About Human Cloning”. Human Cloning.org – “1. Cloning Xeroxes a person.
Cloning merely re-creates the genes of the ancestor, not what he has learned or experienced. Technically, it re-creates the genotype, not the phenotype. (Even at that, only 99% of those genes get re-created because 1% of such a child’s genes would come from those in the egg – mitochondrial DNA). Conventional wisdom holds that about half of who we are comes from our genes, the other half, from the environment.
Cloning cannot re-create what in us came from the environment; it also cannot re-create memories. The false belief that cloning recreates a person stems in part from the common, current false belief in simplistic, genetic reductionism, i. e., that a person really is just determined by his genes. No reputable geneticist or psychologist believes this.”
“The case for cloning humans”. The Age. January 1, 2003 – “But what of the souls? Can two people share the one soul? Is it not wrong to force two personalities on to one piece of divine substance? Again, the fact that there are identical twins counts against there being a problem. Twins seem to manage, and that seems to suggest that each person is able to be ensouled regardless of their genetic make-up. That is, assuming souls exist at all. These days theologians don’t make a big thing of the soul. But even if there are souls, it seems unlikely to count against cloning. It’s hard to imagine that God would have any difficulty telling the difference between one clone and another, or in ensuring that each person has a distinct soul – if that is how it works.
In fact, of course, every person is an individual as much because of their environment, experiences and relationships as because of their genetic make-up. Otherwise twins would be indistinguishable – and that is far from being the case.
In the case of a clone, deliberately created, there is a further difference that virtually guarantees individuality: they live in a different time from their genetic twin. Anyone who is cloned is older than their clone; their life experiences cannot be identical without recourse to a time machine.”
“Why cloning people is a good idea” Everything2 – “A person is more than their genes. This is without even considering the fact that Dolly was not genetically identical to the source sheep.
A person’s outward appearance and inner personality are mostly determined by their environment, and to a much smaller extent by their genes. How much food the child eats, how the environment interacts and how he or she interacts with the environment – these are the real issues that determine who we are. There may or may not be genes that influence how we react to the environment, but there certainly aren’t genes that determine it.”