This paper originally appeared in The Mankind Quarterly , vol. 38, number 3, pp. 69-73
Scott-Townsend Publishers, Washington DC., Spring 1998
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Citing a "national consensus" that human cloning is "morally unacceptable,"
President Clinton has come out in support of a recommendation of the National
Bioethics Commission (created in 1995) to effectively outlaw introduction of the
new technique. But as we all know, consensus does not necessarily signify
unanimity, and the reason the Bioethics Commission deemed such a law necessary
is that many scientists are only too eager to begin work in the area. If they
were not, there would be no need for legislation. If a country decides to
restrict scientific activity in this area, there are in fact several legislative
options: to ban all research into human cloning, to try to regulate future
research, or third, to ban the actual production of human babies by
cloning.
The Arguments Against Human
Cloning
If cloning research were pursued, it has been
estimated that human cloning could become a practical reality within the next
one to two decades. However, some of the arguments in favor of banning cloning
were listed in the July 1997 issue of the ABN Journal. These may be
summarized as follows:
1. Nobody can claim that the right to clone is
constitutionally protected as a fundamental liberty or privacy right - Lori B.
Andrews, professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law.
2. Once we
start down the path of research into human cloning, how do we limit how far we
should go - it is a small step from genetic enhancement to eugenics, a
pseudo-science aimed at improving the human race through selective reproduction.
The nazis seized on these theories of racial superiority and extended them to
the most fiendish ends -Mark A. Rothstein, professor at the University of
Houston Law Center .
3. In the clone age not there could be other
physical replicas of myself running around - R. Alto Charo, professor of law at
the University of Wisconsin in Madison. A member of Clinton's National Bioethics
Advisory Commission.
The Arguments FOR
Cloning
So if, as Clinton claims, there is "consensus" on the
subject of totally banning reproduction by cloning, there is still a minority
opinion. What is this and what are the minority's arguments? On the ideational
front, human ecology is a topic which refuses simply to "go away," and over a
half century after the suppression of eugenics throughout the Western world (but
not in the Orient), medical genetics is pushing eugenics to the forefront again,
and new treatises of eugenic interest continue to appear .It is a simple fact
that human evolution (in the sense of genetic change, either eugenic or
dysgenic) has not only not come to a halt, but is actually proceeding at a
speed heretofore unknown. Birth control methods and modem social conditions have
created an evolutionary mechanism which will have altered the genetic makeup of
humankind in the time it takes to read this brief comment - and it is irrational
to believe that thinking individuals are unaware about what is happening, no
matter how studiously they may seek to avoid open discussion of the facts in the
current intellectual climate.
The nature/nurture argument has basically
been a holding tactic pursued, very effectively, by extreme egalitarians. There
are only three possible positions which could be taken on the topic: is human
behavior controlled by genes, environment, or both? All serious scientists now
agree that human behavior is a product of both genes and environment. As for
total genetic predisposition, this view has never been seriously argued, but the
extreme environmentalists have managed to successfully maintain the opposite:
that human individuals are a tabula rasa, a "clean slate " capable of
accepting any text that the environment, cultural as well as physical, imprints
on them.
The deterministic worldview of nineteenth-century positivism
encountered enormous emotional resistance, and the past century and a half has
been dominated by a view of human nature that emphasizes the software of the
human brain over its hardware Freudianism, Marxism, radical feminism, Skinner's
behaviorism, the anthropology of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, and the theories
fashionable in modem criminology, all explain human behavior almost exclusively
in terms of environmental influences -while inherited traits are rejected as
invidious and offensive. As for those who put these theories to the test, they
have all earned that the messenger can be quickly hanged on the nearest tree if
his missive is received unfavorably.
In the 19th century, Sir Francis
Galton, Darwin's cousin and the founder of statistics, was deeply troubled by
differential fertility patterns whereby young people of ability were neglecting
to have children. His gloomy demographic projections are proving to be
frighteningly accurate. As readers of the Wall Street Journal already
know, 40% of births in today's America are now financed by Medicaid,l
while America's elites devote their fertile years to graduate training,
professional development and global junketing. Economists even explain fertility
on the basis of a cost curve: one baby costs the equivalent of X-number of
televisions, sports cars, condos, etc. Society suffers from a cruel
contradiction: the more accurately it selects its future leaders for training
and careers, the more effectively it deflects them from the essential task of
species reproduction. Now it is the welfare population that serves as our
breeding stock. This is a problem encountered across races, economic systems,
and continents.
There are negative and positive eugenics.
Negative
eugenics calls for reducing the fertility of persons suffering from low
intelligence and physical defects that can be passed on to future generations.
In effect, cloning could operate as a form of positive eugenics, increasing the
number of births of persons whom the genetic lottery has favored with good
health and high intelligence. Clones are little different from identical twins,
and although in some primitive societies identical twins were regarded with such
superstitious fear that the second was customarily killed, surely in our modern
enlightened age we are not saying that identical twins are in some way less
desirable than fraternal twins or other siblings?
A certain amount of cloning
would minimally increase the number of identical twins in society - hardly the
horror it is made out to be by the sensation-hungry popular press.
As of
mid-1996, the global population had risen to 5.7 billion people. By simply
glancing into any textbook on statistics, we can see that only one person in
10,000 has an IQ exceeding the mean by 3.7 standard deviations (which
corresponds to an IQ of 155 in European populations). Globally, only 570,000
persons are in the range of 3.7 standard deviations above the global mean,
whatever that mean may be. It is arguably to these more talented people
that we owe the great breakthroughs in science, out of all proportion to their
percentage in the global population. William Shockley, who helped make the
modern computer possible, was one such individual -who was nevertheless
castigated for interesting himself in the link between heredity and human
intellectual achievement.
This year, some 8,000 persons will be born with
an IQ exceeding their national mean by 3.7 standard deviations. This is an
insignificant figure in global terms, yet continued advances in science will
demand a continued supply of persons of high intelligence in future generations
.By way of comparison, the world population is increasing (births over deaths)
by 2% per annum, or 11.4 million per year.
There is a long-standing
discussion on the nature of intelligence and "g-loading": is there an underlying
general intelligence, or is high IQ simply a combination of exceptional talents
in a number of areas? The pro-cloning argument does not hinge on this question.
If IQ is simply a statistical mean score of unrelated talents which are
individually heritable, then this statistical mean will itself be heritable in
subsequent generations .
Many would correctly argue that it is desirable
to select not only for high IQ, but for a nwnber of other characteristics. Let
us imagine what we want for our children: health, mental ability, and sense of
altruism that embraces the wellbeing of future generations , not only those
alive today. It is true that such factors are the product of culture as well as
heredity, but so long as heritability is a factor, we are left dealing with the
fact that many who exhibit these qualities fail to have children or at least to
reproduce themselves at even replacement level.
One of the chief
scientific objections raised against cloning, though not mentioned amongst those
quoted in the ABN Journal cited at the beginning of this brief article,
is that it reduces genetic variability in a population. While this is true, the
magnitude of this reduction in variability in relation to the current global
population would be in any conceivable circumstances insignificant. By way of
comparison, cheetahs have gone through such a narrow genetic bottleneck in the
past that at one point there may have been only one or two breeding pairs alive.
Indeed, on a less dramatic scale, genetic bottlenecks are a crucial component in
evolution, and our ancestral hominids lived under conditions of extremely tight
interbreeding, a condition that actually facilitated rapid selective evolution.
Modem society has largely blunted the pruning process of natural selection: but
every generation remains a genetic bottleneck. With the declining importance of
natural selection in our contemporary socio-cultural environment, the future of
Homo sapiens today hinges on the fact that it is not necessarily the more
capable segments of the world community that will shape the genetic quality of
posterity, but only the more prolific.