Not good science.
It mixes various things under cloning. One is selection, starting a dozen, screening, and picking the best two children to bring to term. It is a way to avoid expressed recesives for a generation, but they are still there.
A clone is a cell from one creature grown again, and the same problems, as even clones have varaiation. Plant a dozen seeds, thin to the strongest three.
The fastest growing may not be the best fruit producers, as many of our current crops show, high yield and a standard profuct, but lacking in taste, smell, texture.
We are a long way from fixing DNA, it seems some is just filler, and what will get expressed, is still beyond guess.
We can splice in other genes, but the results are iffy. Known results in one generation, but no idea of long term effects.
Nature has a system, humans have been throuigh several genetic bottlenecks, the whole species dropping to 5000, and some lines, Europeans, can be traced to a group of less than a hundred.
Those who survived times that killed off most of their species were not the more emphatic and tolerant, they were most likely the ones who first turned cannibal. Natural slection favors survivors.
Some things may be common because of survival. When the Black Death killed so many in Europe, reclusive OCD types, who kept a clean house, and avoided humans, would have survived better than those who mixed with the world. Those who showed empathy and went to help the sick, died.
We are tested in several directions, those who are just like everyone else prosper at times, and are in uniform marching to the front with everyone else at other times. It leaves the village idiot to reproduce.
A University Anthropology professor told me the Black Death favored a blood type, when they were dead, it stopped, when more were born, becme common, the Black Death returned. Less people died in each wave, often half of a house, with the other half untouched. In the end, some blood types became rare in Europe, and so did the Black Death.
Religion and Nationalism also seems to have extirminated it's true believers.
Grain has been selected for high yield, and food value has been dropping. with all production narrowed to one line, when it's version of the Black Death comes, all will die. Those that feed on the grain will die, and it will favor some other group.
The reason we have the humans we do is because they are what passed all the tests. Religion would select for church going, government for tax payers who will die in their wars, but cultures who produced many mighty warriors, found they killed their own people, and each other.
Up to 1850 brute force prevailed. Since then there has been a selection for intelligence, the industrial era, then Science, Technology, and now we have Aspies like Australia has rabbits. Mighty warriors of intellect also have unwanted side effects, but with mono cropping, all that exists is the current gene pool.
The only answer is to breed and treat for size. If humans, who have killed off the predators, were two foot tall, it would solve all of our food and space problems. They might have smaller brains, but they would not know. one fruit tree could feed a village. We could also reap great savings if they were given the genes for fur.
Some modification so they could feed directly on grass, and we would have solved most of the problems we can see now.
I notice this article was written in 2001, Windows 2000 was the highest technology. I favor sticking with the humans we have till the bugs are worked out of Vista.
11 Apr 2008, 6:32 am
