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« More Gray News For Gray | Main | Gay/Liberal Intolerance »

I'm My Own Grandpaw

In addition to cribbing my schtick about Punxatawney Yasser on Thursday (it was probably a case of great minds thinking alike...), normally-sensible James Taranto went off on a rant yesterday--he seems to be a Kassian queasitarian.

On one issue, however, Fukuyama is right and the libertarians are nuts. That issue is reproductive cloning, the manufacture of babies that are genetically identical to an already living human being. Libertarians pooh-pooh objections to reproductive cloning on the grounds that, as blogger Josh Chafetz suggests, a clone is no different from an identical twin.

But this is fatuous. A pair of identical twins are siblings, equally situated toward each other. By contrast, if a man clones himself, he is the "father" to his clone, responsible for his care and upbringing. Libertarians say there's no need to outlaw reproductive cloning because it's unlikely very many people will want to practice it. That's probably true, but those who would are probably those we would least want to. After all, what kind of egomaniac wants to raise a carbon copy of himself?

Well, that might be true. But the fact that some of us don't think that someone would make a good parent hasn't, heretofore, resulted in state sanctions against it. Mr. Taranto is entitled to his opinion as to whether people who want to clone are definitionally unfit parents, but I can't see any basis in law for it.

To understand what's wrong with reproductive cloning, consider the proscription against incest--a remarkably resilient taboo, having survived the sexual revolution unscathed. Even libertarians, who defend the right of consenting adults to do everything from prostitution to polygamy and snorting coke to freezing dead relatives' heads, have never, so far as we know, championed a man's "right" to sleep with his adult daughter.

Well, actually some have...

And what's his problem with freezing dead relative's heads? Why is it all right to burn them, or let them rot, but not freeze them? Oh, I know. It makes him "queasy."

Incest horrifies us because it violates the boundaries that define the most fundamental human relationships, those on which both social cohesion and individual happiness depend. The relationship between parent and child, or brother and sister, is fraught enough without introducing the elements of sexual possessiveness and jealousy that a love affair entails. If children result from an incestuous union, the family tree becomes a horrific tangle, in which parents are also aunts, uncles or grandparents.

No, James.

Incest horrifies us because we've been bred to have it horrify us. It's called an evolutionary adaptation. For the reasons you state, but more importantly, for reasons of the probability of genetic unhappiness resulting from inbreeding, those earlier humans (and their non-human ancestors) who mated with siblings, parents, and children were less successful than those who didn't. The folks (and pre-folks) with a natural repugnance to incest had a better chance of passing on their genes, so most people (and other animals) alive today have a more-or-less strong version of that genetic trait.

The implication of this is that a natural revulsion developed in more natural times might not necessarily be valid in the modern world, in which we have more control over our genetics, just as religious dietary proscriptions developed by nomadic desert peoples might have little utility in a world of health inspectors and refrigeration.

Feelings are generally just our genes' way of getting us to do what they want us to. We've overcome them in the past (by, for example, teaching that rape is wrong and developing systems of morality in general), and there's nothing holy about the anti-incest feelings, or anti-cloning feelings, either. We have to evaluate the morality of it in the context of our value system--we cannot just "go with our gut."

Cloning raises a similar set of problems. Suppose a couple decide to produce a "son" by cloning the husband. Who are the resulting child's parents? The man and his wife, who are raising the child? Or the man's parents, whose coupling produced the boy's genes? Suppose instead of cloning himself, the man clones his father. Suddenly he's his own grandpa.

Now he's confusing two separate concepts--genetics and legality.

Many people have legal children who share none of their genes (it's called adoption). Many people have people who share some or all of their genes for whom they have no legal responsibility whatsoever (e.g., identical twins, or an anonymous sperm donor). Certainly the law is going to have to catch up here, as it did with things like surrogate motherhood, or in-vitro fertilization, but surely he's joking if he thinks that a man cloning his father, and raising the son, literally makes him a legal grandfather of himself.

Parentage and responsibility to raise children is determined not solely by genetics, but by intent and action. Mr. Taranto needs to untangle these concepts in his mind before he'll be able to discourse on them usefully.

If that's not enough to make you queasy, consider this scenario: A 30-year-old couple produce a "daughter" who is a clone of the wife. Two decades pass, the girl grows up, and her middle-aged "father"--with whom she has no genetic kinship--suddenly finds himself face to face with a young woman who is not just hauntingly similar but identical to the woman with whom he fell in love when he was young.

No, not literally identical. Even identical twins aren't literally identical, in the sense that there are no physical or personality differences between them. Genes aren't a blueprint--they're a recipe. The cook (in this case the environment of the womb, and the environment in which the child is brought to maturity) can have a lot of influence over the final product, even if the recipe is followed. Twins are identical because they are produced identically. But it would be surprising (at least to me) if a child bred in a different womb, and raised by different parents in different times, would be the same person as her genetically-identical mother. I don't know about Mr. Taranto, but I fall in love with people for much more than their physical attributes.

But even it she were literally identical, it is certainly fodder for an entertaining soap opera, but assuming that a woman is foolish enough to engage in such an endeavor with her husband, why should the state prohibit it? I still await an answer other than the state of Mr. Taranto's stomach.

Reproductive cloning is a monstrous proposition, for reasons that have little to do with the debates over genetic engineering and over the cloning of embryos for medical research. Responsible advocates of scientific progress would do well to be relentless about making this distinction.

I agree that the distinction should be made--there are certainly vastly different ethical issues involved in the two cases. But I simply fail to see it as the intrinsic monstrosity that Mr. Taranto does. Now I suppose that I'll make him queasy.

But the fact remains that, when the state chooses to interfere with people's freedom, we need a more compelling reason than "yuck." I haven't yet heard one from either Mr. Taranto, or Professor Kass.

Posted by Rand Simberg at May 04, 2002 10:32 AM
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Taranto's example of the father with the daughter who is genetically identical to his wife is laughable. A great deal of literature, drama, film, songs, hinges upon a child who is exactly like his/her father/mother. Usually, in the opposite sex parent, this is imagined to induce fond nostalgia, not lust.

I also have to laugh at this: "After all, what kind of egomaniac wants to raise a carbon copy of himself?" Er, a large fraction of people who want to become parents? Many parents have, as at least part of their motivation, a desire to see their genes carried on, although they seldom think of it in just those terms. Parents are usually very proud to have their children resemble them, and are disappointed when they don't.

Unfortunately, most of the debate about cloning is formed in just this sort of atmosphere---I lot of queasy stomachs, and not many clear heads. I remember well when the first test-tube baby was born, and pundits said, "How will the child feel, knowing she was conceived in a (gasp!) test tube?? And how will her peers think of her? Will we have a whole class of people who are thought of as less than human because they were not conceived according to God's plan?" Um, "just fine", "they don't care", and "no", in that order.

Posted by Angie Schultz at May 4, 2002 02:09 PM

Rand :

Actually the incest taboo is more likely a function of the damage it would do to the family and society than anything like an understanding of the genetic damage it was doing. It seems obvious that having mothers, wives, and daughters competing for the affections of the pater familias would simply have been so disruptive that societies had to ban it.

Posted by oj at May 4, 2002 03:27 PM

Banning something doesn't make it repulsive. In fact, if it has to be legally banned, it's often because it's insufficiently repulsive to prevent it from happening naturally (e.g., drug use).

You're confusing cause and effect, though. Most societies ban incest because it's a universal human trait to think it a disgusting behavior, and this is due to evolutionary pressures (some of which are indeed due to the family disruption, as well as the birth defect issues).

Posted by Rand Simberg at May 4, 2002 03:46 PM

About the "yuck" factor...

Certainly it is possible for some individuals to overcome these kind of instinctual revulsions to particular behaviors, but it's a sociologically interesting observation that there are some behaviors that seem "yuck" inducing across diverse human cultures. It suggests that there are some evolutionary "guardrails" which set limits on "natural" human behavior.

These "yuck" inducing behaviors seem to be related to the ancient psychological drives of hunger and sex (I can't really think of one which directly relates to thirst, except perhaps there's an aversion to drinking body fluids like blood or urine). So in addition to having positive drives towards nourishment and mating, we've got these instinctual aversions which modify the drives so as to serve as an additional incentive to behave in evolutionarily favored ways.

I've been trying to come up with a list of the "yucks" (feel free to add any I've missed):

Cannibalism. And to a lesser extent, consumption of body fluids like blood or urine (which might help explain the origin of the vampire myth).

Coprophagy (for hygienic reasons if nothing else).

Incest (probably for social disruption reasons, as well as the occasional genetic mishap). Promoting genetic diversity through outbreeding is evolutionarily advantageous.

Homosexuality (generally a "yuck" for heterosexuals). From what I've been told, heterosexuality is not a similar "yuck" to homosexuals, they just tend to view it with indifference.

The evolutionary significance of homosexuality is understandably controversial. Some (notably, many homosexuals) argue that there could be group level advantages related to intellectual creativity.
Others (myself included) view it as an occasional erroneous result of the same developmental process which feminizes or masculinizes the brain in heterosexuals.

It should be noted that these theories are not mutually exclusive. It could be that the gender-assignment process in brain development works well enough in most cases to ensure the survival of the species, but whatever adaptive advantages having gays in a population confers upon the group (if any) has acted as to counter any evolutionary pressure to wring the last few percent of error out of the process. Or, like the hiccups, and the blind spot in the eye, biological processes don't have to be perfect to be "good enough" in an evolutionary sense.

Pedophilia (primarily for social disruption reasons). Seeking younger mates is otherwise evolutionarily favored, so this would enforce a limit that they be postpubescent, since prepubescent matings are not productive.

So getting back to the cloning issue, I personally see less objection to reproductive cloning than "therapeutic" cloning. Creating human life for the purpose of consuming it (as we do with cattle, as Rand so helpfully noted earlier in another thread) is morally repugnant to me, in no small measure because it runs up against the cannibalism taboo. If we could engineer cattle or other animals to produce human organs or stem cells for transplantation, I'd say the case for therapeutic cloning becomes much weaker. But we shouldn't be culturing humans as a cash crop.

Posted by Ken Barnes at May 4, 2002 09:58 PM

"The evolutionary significance of homosexuality is understandably controversial. Some (notably, many homosexuals) argue that there could be group level advantages related to intellectual creativity."

"Others (myself included) view it as an occasional erroneous result of the same developmental process which feminizes or masculinizes the brain in heterosexuals."

I think it much more likely that it's an unfortunate side effect of a combination of other beneficial (but recessive) genes. For example, sickle-cell leukemia is a result of getting the gene for it from both parents. Why does such a gene persist in any population? Because if one gets it from one parent only, it confers immunity to malaria, which, in tropical Africa where the chances of contracting this disease were very high, was a very useful trait indeed, even if many came down with sickle cell instead.

Similarly, I suspect that homosexuality is a condition which occurs from a combination of genes, each of which in itself is beneficial, but the combination of which results in this unfortunate condition.

"Creating human life for the purpose of consuming it (as we do with cattle, as Rand so helpfully noted earlier in another thread) is morally repugnant to me, in no small measure because it runs up against the cannibalism taboo."

That comes down to what we define as "human life." I don't do so simply by DNA. To reduce the concept of human to a simple genetic construct is, to me, to diminish it far below its noble potential or actuality.

Posted by Rand Simberg at May 4, 2002 11:05 PM

Rand :

That's simply ludicrous. Why do we need to make murder, pedaphilia, etc. illegal if that's the case?

Posted by oj at May 5, 2002 09:43 AM

If what's the case?

Posted by Rand Simberg at May 5, 2002 10:38 AM

Why are there laws against cannibalism and incest? Because of that last few evolutinary percent. An earlier post noted that there is a blindspot in our eyes. No doubt there is a way around this - but the ill effects of having one are so small compared to the probably energy expenditure and difficulty in getting rid of it, that we live with it, largely unaware that we are not seeing a small area.

So, incest is taboo for genetic and social reasons (though I would have to say it is probably more social and genetic with us.) Animals have it, but to a lesser extent - and domesticated animals, especially pets, where the normal pressures that would drive them apart are absent, do engage in incestuous matings and have problems as a result.

Historically, humans have actually encouraged it, etiher strongly in the case of Egyptian and Hawaiian nobility or weakly as in the case of European nobility.

Cannibalism is the same way. The weakness here is that while under no circumstances, including extreme survival, is anyone likely to be able to eat a dead memeber of thier own family. The farther from the family group, though, the more a person, historically, could fall into the group of other - which means that under some circumstances, it would be allowed. That all branches of humanity have routinely practiced it - and that it remains a minor but ongoing problem in all cultures (think not? Hannibal Lecter - hero or villain, you decide).

Undoubtedly it would be better if the biological base for incest or cannibalism were absolute rather than relative - but the energy requried to achieve it is too great, I think.

So, we have taboos and laws.

Given this forum, I might also add that one remember or reread Heinlein for some counter culture viewpoints on these. (Stranger in a Strange Land - and Time Enough for Love and his very last book, the title of which escapes me)

Posted by Dan at May 5, 2002 11:18 AM

Unfortunately, no one had the temerity to edit Heinlein in his later work, though he badly needed it.

But I think that we're seeing a cultural clash between people who think that SF is an escapist waste of time, and those who were brought up on Heinlein, Clarke, Dick, Leguin, Asimov et al, and are more prepared for the future.

Posted by Rand Simberg at May 5, 2002 11:36 AM

Rand :

You said : "Banning something doesn't make it repulsive. In fact, if it has to be legally banned, it's often because it's insufficiently repulsive to prevent it from happening naturally (e.g., drug use)."

That's what I referred to as ludicrous. Nothing is sufficiently repulsive that we need not ban it--people will do anything if you let them. So we ban those things that the rest of us are repulsed by.

Posted by oj at May 5, 2002 11:45 AM

But being repulsed by something is not, in itself, justification to ban it, even if most people are repulsed by it. That's why we have a Constitution--so we don't have tyranny of the majority. We don't ban the eating of land arthropods, though I'd venture to say that the vast majority of Americans (including me) are repulsed by it.

I repeat, we need some basis other than "yuck" on which to base laws. We don't ban murder simply because we find it repulsive--we do so because it's a violation of the right of the murder victim to live.

Posted by Rand Simberg at May 5, 2002 12:00 PM

>We don't ban the eating of land arthropods,
>though I'd venture to say that the vast
>majority of Americans (including me) are
>repulsed by it."

I'm miserable at phylogeny, and I'm not even
a half-vast majority, but I'm one American
who heartily endorses eating snails.
Arthopods with with garlic sauce. Yummm.

>I repeat, we need some basis other than "yuck"
>on which to base laws. We don't ban murder
>imply because we find it repulsive--we do so
>because it's a violation of the right of the
>murder victim to live.

Absolutely. Especially now that I've grossed
you out. ;^)

Posted by Quinbus Flestrin at May 5, 2002 01:35 PM

Snails aren't arthropods--they're gastropods...

Posted by Rand Simberg at May 5, 2002 02:25 PM

Speaking of ingesting gastropods, I recall a satire of Oscar Wilde (back when National Lampoon was readable) traveling in the American West and warning a gunslinger not to shoot a Frenchman as the resulting odor released into the room would render all unconscious.

I have to disagree with OJ. Some things are banned because they lack a universal repulsiveness and thus we create a stricture that allows us to control those few inclined to cross that line. The great majority of us find the eliminatory functions of others repulsive and we tend to seek privacy to perform these functions ourselves. (Primarily because this is a moment of great vulnerability to predators.) We don't ban our eliminatory functions since it would be simply impossible but we do place constraints on those who feel compelled to share.

Regarding incest, there are shrinks who claim they can demonstrate that those were raised as siblings (regardless of actual relation) during a certain formative period of childhood will be disinclined to see each other as potential mates later on despite being otherwise attractive. This has become the basis of a staple plot of teen romance movies like 'My Secret Admirer' and 'The Trojan War' in which a young male ardently pursues a beautiful stranger while ignoring the stunner who has been a surrogate sister.

For some reason the pursued female is a blonde (Kelly Preston and Marley Shelton respectively) and the pseudo-sister a brunette (Lori Loughlin and Jennifer Love Heweitt) but that may just be stacking the plot deck. Of course, in both of these movies the anti-incest instinct is overcome and the girl next door wins out.

Posted by Eric Pobirs at May 5, 2002 06:25 PM

Rand, you're certainly right about the later Heinlein needing an editor... and if I'm not mistaken "To Sail Beyond The Sunset" is the title that escaped Dan's memory.

Anyway, back to the yucky Clone Wars, and the Artist Formerly Known As "Therapeutic Cloning".

The term "therapeutic cloning" seems not to be polling too well, so there was an effort by Sen. Arlen Specter on CBS' "Face Bob Schieffer" this morning to re-brand the procedure as "nuke-you-ler" transplantation. After all, people get transplants all the time (at least more frequently than politicians correctly pronounce "nu-clear"), and there's not a big fuss made.

Little does Sen. Specter know (and I mean that emphatically), the word "nuclear" doesn't go over very well politically, either. That most excellent technology known today as "MRI" for "magnetic resonance imaging" was originally (and still is to chemists) known as "nuclear magnetic resonance," but the procedure didn't see widespread public support until they changed the name to remove the "nuclear".

People apparently feared being "irradiated" by the "nuclear" technology, and were much more comfortable basking in the glow of a _real_ radiation-generating device like a CAT scan. Go figure.


For the uninitiated, the MRI machine doesn't produce any radiation, but uses a strong magnetic field to cause the billions of *gasp* _nuclei_ in your atoms to send out a radio signal announcing their position and what element they are. Way cool. The magnetic field causes the nuclei of the different chemical elements to resonate differently and then the MRI detects the signals and plots the results in 3D, hence "nuclear magnetic resonance".

I note that this belated effort to change the terms of the cloning debate is the sign of an impending political defeat for the clonophiles.

Posted by Ken Barnes at May 5, 2002 08:26 PM

Got nothing to offer on the various snails, why-homosexuality?, and Wilde-gunslinging threads, but I do think a better case can be made against repro-cloning than Taranto, Fukuyama etc. have made. I try to do that here:
http://www.geocities.com/eve_tushnet/reproclones1

Sorry for lousy formating. It's short.
Eve

Posted by Eve Tushnet at May 6, 2002 01:10 PM

Apropos the "yuck" factor and the law: Jeffry Dahmer was convicted of cannibalism in Wisconsin a few years ago (at least I think he was convicted of that, along with a few other things), but his predecessor, Ed Gein (sp?), who waa the living inspiration for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, et al was not even able to be charged with cannibalism in Wisconsin at the time (1950's) because IT WASN'T AGAINST THE LAW!! That was quickly changed. He was, however, charged with and convicted of desecrating human bodies. I occasionally use this example in class to demonstrate to students quirks in the law. (P.S., I'm afraid to check this out on Snopes.com for fear it's an urban legend ;->=

Posted by Dave I at May 6, 2002 03:39 PM

I read your piece, Eve and find it's just more "ooh, icky" nonsense.

Your twin/daughter will not be you. You will be separated by a wide gulf of subjective experience and growing up under significantly different circumstances, unless your engage in some sort of Philip K. Dick 'Time Out Of Joint' Potemkin-village attempt to duplicate the circumstances of your childhood. Didn't work in the fictional 'Boys from Brazil' and I don't think it would work in life.

Those differences would play a vastly greater role in the mother-daughter relationship than a shared genome. If having a genome too close would spoil the relationship than what of having genomes far apart. Should we outlaw adoption since its pretty well guaranteed that in a moment of anger the child will eventually issue the heartbreaking statement, "You aren't my real mother!"

You other tact might make sense if it were even remotely probably to become a pressing issue. My family has seen some severe birth defects in its youngest generation, too. This makes me more interested in studying embryonic development, not less. The difficulties in producing viable cloned embryos have much to tell about the same failures under 'natural' conditions.

And for the record, although my sister is fiercely devoted to making my neice's life the best it can possibly be she also has no problem stating she would have had an abortion and trying again if she knew what that child was going to endure.

Posted by Eric Pobirs at May 10, 2002 05:49 AM

Please pardon my asking if it's a sensitive subject (but you brought it up), but what does your niece think? Does she literally wish she'd never been born? Or is it a mental defect that would prevent her from having such a wish, or expressing it?

Posted by Rand Simberg at May 10, 2002 07:23 AM

She isn't old enough yet to have given it much thought. What she does know is that extremely few other children have experienced the number of major surgeries she has, as well as very unusual daily circumstances for some years before she could be fed other than through a G-tube. I haven't checked recently but she may still be the record holder for smallest infant to survive the corrective surgury that made her initial survival possible. My sister and her husband had 15 minutes to make the decision for or against the attempt just after the emergency C-section when my sister became toxemic and near death herself.

The hard part still remains. This is a kid who worships Britney Spears and has scars across her torso like a map of the interstate system. She is remarkably unselfconscious about it but adolescence, the period in life when physical appearance takes on maximum importance, still lies ahead. And then there are the attendent worries that the changes that will kick in may have all kinds of unknown effects on her decidedly non-standard physiology. This is a kid whose appendix was pre-emptively removed for fear that a surgeon might not be able to find it quickly enough in an emergency. They were already in the neighborhood working on other nearby bits so it seemed the thing to do.

Whether she feels her suffering overwhelms any enjoyment in her existence is really moot though. Not to accuse you but that is a standard lead-in from the hand wringers and rigid anti-abortionists. It has no useful role at the time a parent must make a critical decision. Even the parent of a perfectly healthy child knows that in all probability that they will someday hear, "I wish I'd never been born!" It passes usually. The kid we're discussing may have stronger motives than most but she'll be quite normal in going through that phase if she ever does.

Nobody rational and considering parenthood spends much time worrying whether their child will someday hate them. They need only look back on their own past and know that in most cases the answer is yes and that in most cases this too shall pass.

"Nobody asked me if I wanted to be born," is another time warping rite of passage. "If only that were an option," is the only reply. But it isn't an option. Parenthood is guaranted to contain a measure of turmoil, strife, heartbreak, and nagging worries that never cease, even in the case of the most perfect offspring. It comes with the caring and the control that must be exerted to produce a functional human rather than an Ed Gein.

The same thing applies to one who consciously chooses not to become a parent. There will always be some idiot asking but what if your kid was the next Einstein. So? What if he was the next Hitler? These go beyond the things a person must realistically consider. What if Capra played the other way? What if George Bailey were shown that his existence was a blot upon every life it influenced? Under such circumstance choosing to cancel his own birth would make hime heroic. Although if he was Catholic I guess he'd have to elect for SIDS after being baptized so he wouldn't get stuck in Limbo.

Besides, if we get this reproductive cloning thing right we can make as many Einsteins as we like. The trick is raising them into people who are better members of humanity than those produced by the old random in-out session. Scientifically, we haven't the slightest how that might be done. The biggest challenge we face is the oldest one. Not how we produce babies but how we turn those babies into decent adults.

Posted by Eric Pobirs at May 10, 2002 06:07 PM

You need to get a new life because you are really freaking me out.

Posted by nicholas quintana at October 25, 2004 01:38 PM

additional "yuck" Necrophilia

Posted by Monica at September 7, 2005 07:15 PM


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