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.

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.

For those of you who use bravenet.com as your hit counter, I notice that some of you don’t have the image sized in your HTML. If you put in an image in a page, with no size, the page will delay the load until it gets the image, because it doesn’t know how much real estate to allocate it in the browser display.

If you add the parameters “height=xxx width=yyy” where xxx is the image height in pixels, and yyy the width, as parameters to the “img src=…” tag, you might be able to get around the bravenet delay, even when bravenet is down. For instance, if you “view source” on my code, you’ll see that my tip bucket is explicitly sized, so that the page loads quickly even if Amazon is slow in responding (which it occasionally is).

Unfortunately, I don’t know the size for the Bravenet hit counter myself, but if you can find the image somewhere, and load it into a graphics program, it will tell you the size.

This is pretty cool. Sandia has come up with a microchain for transmitting mechanical power.

OK, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I want to discuss more important matters that came up in the process of indulging in my primal tribal urges…

While I was watching college football (in particular the FL-Auburn game), I saw an advertisement.

It was an advertisement for a tool ( not surprising, considering the demographic–it was included amidst other ads about lawn fertilizer, razor blades, fermented malt beverages, hair regrowth tonics, etc.–you know the drill).

Now, I have observed, both from advertisements, and from actually shopping and purchasing from places like Home Depot, over the past few years, that tools for manly men (such as moi of course, and Tim the Toolman ), have both improved in quality and reduced in price, to the point of amazing. When I was a kid (more years ago than I like to think about, or even describe……..all right, it was in the late ’60s and early ’70s), tools were precious implements. They were things to request, generally in futility, from financially-strapped parents, for special occasions, such as birthdays or Christmas. And if such tools were Craftsman, with their lifetime warranty (we couldn’t aspire to such Olympian implements of the gods from Snap-on)…, well, that was more than a birthday–it was a premature visitation to Paradise, and one of which we were obviously and blatantly undeserving.

But enough of the trip down memory lane. The point is, that now I can in fact go down to Home Depot, and find on sale drop-forged tools of which, as a pimply youth, I could only have dreamed, for a price that is a minor blip on my already-overcharged credit cards.

All right, so they’re made in China. Isn’t globalization wonderful?

These tools are not just cheap^H^H^H^H^H affordable–they’re damned useful. They can do things that we could only fantasize about (assume we had a really rich and lustrous fantasy life). In fact, when we see Bob Villa shilling for them, admit it–we are all kicking ourselves wondering why we didn’t come up with this idea so that we too could get ripped off by some venture capitalist who would take our idea and run with it, using his money, and leaving us with an infinitesimal fraction of the company that would exploit it and make millions for someone with more money and smarts than us.

So, why am I boring y’all with this?

I saw an ad for a new kind of tool. A magical, transcendant tool–a tool that I could not have envisioned in my most drug-addled adolescent fantasies. It was a universal wrench, called the Gator Grip (most appropriate, considering I was watching it during the Florida (Gator)-Auburn game at the time). When I saw it, I thought immediately of Hans Morovec’s book, published much over a decade ago (depressing how long ago), called “Mind Children.”

In that book, he described fractal robots, creatures of human invention, into which we would download our minds/souls, and they would have a semi-infinite number of appendages, with which to explore the world around us, manipulate it, and (most importantly) interact with other fractal robots to induce in them pleasure, in a semi-infinite sort of fingular interaction (sorry, I’m not going to get more explicit–this is a family-oriented stream-of consciousness, or in my case, puddle of consciousness…). I.E., robot sex, except sex much better than we can even imagine, unless we subscribe to some of the really hot sites on the net.

Anyway, I digress again (sorry, college football and sex have that effect…).

My point is, that there are tools for gripping stuff (bolts, nuts, various terrorist appendages, if the damned FAA will allow you to carry them) that we couldn’t even conceive of, let alone purchase, when we were acne-challenged kids working on our cars. This particular tool, with which I am now enamored, has a lot of little pins, in circular pattern, on springs, that when pressed against some object, take its shape.

Now, you might say, “What’s the big deal?” And if you’ve never had to work on a mechanical system (car, furnace, pasta maker) for which you either lacked the proper bit, or the head had been stripped beyond recognition, you would be fully justified in such a question.

But if you’re a manly man, like me, who will spend several hours on repairing something that is worth a dollar ninety eight (when his time is worth several tens of dollars per hour on a good day, if doing something actually useful, and who can’t tolerate the thought of actually paying some drone who is obviously less talented than you at fixing stuff), you will immediately recognize the value of such a de-vice.

It is the universal wrench. It can grab anything–broken wingnuts, stripped screws, stripped nuts, misshapen bolts. How could any man worthy of the name not be willing to take out a fourth mortgage on his house for such a mystical de-vice?

Now, to get to the real point of this demented rant, this tool is really a first step. While it is not a nano de-vice in scale, it most certainly is in concept.

Think about it.

Many conceptualizations of nanorobots imagine them fitting themselves to proteins, folded in a unique protein-like manner, and accommodating themselves to the folds.

Here we have a macro-tool that operates on exactly the same principle. No matter how complex or (OK, let’s be honest, we munge them) …, ummmm…compromised (yeah, that’s the word!) fastener interface that it encounters, it contorts itself to grip.

When I saw this, I had two immediate thoughts.

1. I had to have one of these, for that wood screw I stripped with that screwdriver that I was too cheap to replace, and
   
2. This was a significant step toward de-vices that would indeed work on a micrometer or nanometer level, and that in fact we were close to immortality and eternal happiness. And of course, the singularity, in which we would all become (if we are to believe Bill Joy) slaves to the machine overlords, and toil endlessly in their underground sugar caves.

Anyway, I want one…