Why don't Humans Clone Themselves?
July 6, 1998
I would like to share my thought with you. This is inspired by the greatest scientific breakthought in 1997 -- a Scottish scientist successfully cloned a sheep. The question in my mind is why don't human reproduce by cloning himself? Why do we reproduce through mating with opposite sex?
I learnt once from The Discover Channel that there is a kind of frog in Southern America, they can reproduce either by cloning themselves or by sexual activity. Fascinating enough, scientists found at one pond these frogs clone themselves; but in the other pond, they cross to reproduce. Later at the pond where the frogs reproduce by sex scientists also found a kind of virus that kills the frogs. However, this virus was not found in the other pond where the frogs clone themselves. The theory is that the frogs "advance" themselves genetically by crossing their genes (that is mating) to fight the disease. If the frogs' genetic pattern states the same generations after generations when viruses come and attack they will disappear at the face of the earth. By changing their genetic pattern they have a chance to survive.
In fact, mating is a way of improving our offspring genetically and is also a way of survival in the animal kingdom. Animals, including human, do advance themselves through genetic mutation, as mentioned by Darwin theory in the early 20th Century.
Now we know why advanced animals reproduce through mating, do human really do what nature guard us to do? Human history traces back about 4,000 years ago. This 4,000 years has brought man kind from fresh eating barbarian to civilized space explorer. We do advance a lot. However, anthologists and historians tell us that our skull size is about the same as our ancestors 4,000 years ago. We may be a bit taller and live longer than our ancestor;... and that is... In fact, we have not significant different than our ancestor genetically.
If not the genetic mutation, then what bring us from animal hunter to farmer and from farmer to scholar and from scholar to engineer and from engineer to space explorer....
I believe that we have language and words that no other animals on Earth has. We understand ancient civilization because there are words documenting the important events and milestones. In human history, there are a lot of genius who push human civilization and technology forward, e.g., Isaac Newton, but not all his work were new, he stood on somebody's shoulder, say Galelio, an Italian scientist and astronomer. I believe human advance his civilization through passing knowledge and experience to their youngers, rather than creations by genius. Today, our technology advances even faster, we have computers, we have network, and we have enter information age. A 32 thick vol. of Encyclopedia Britannica can now be held in two compact disk. We can imagine the information we pass to our next generation is enormous. The information we generate in one day would take one person more than his to read them all... If we rely on generic mutation to bring us to today's technology, it would take billion of billions of years.
Do you see the trend now? With today's technology human advancement doesn't rely on mating or sex to reproduce a better offspring. We have information, knowledge, technology.., we can clone animals.., we can clone better animals..., may be better human later.
Before we really clone a better human, I would say if teenagers rush into something that they should not be; tell them for the sake of human advancement , read a CD of Encyclopedia Britannica; by the time they finish it, they can have better kids.