Virginia Postrel (who still doesn't have any way to permalink individual posts) has some good thoughts on the cloning debate today.

In the interest of "equal time," I'd like to recommend the reprint of Ramesh Ponnuru's article on libertarians (including Postrel) and cloning now up on National Review Online.

http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback-ponnuru041202.asp

My favorite part of the article, regarding the idea that since early embryos can divide in two (or more) to become twins, they really aren't an individual human life yet:

"Both arguments from twinning are vulnerable to serious objection. But what's more important ? although the libertarians are wholly oblivious to it ? is that the arguments collide head-on. We're not supposed to worry about reproductive cloning because it just makes twins. But at the same time, it's okay to kill a human entity so long as it's possible for a twin to be derived from it. Since all of us can in theory be cloned at any age, and a clone is just like a twin, that seems to leave all of us without any ground to protest being killed. Which I, for one, resent."

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