Cloning

Icalasari said:

From what I have heard, seen, and read, they even have similar thought patterns, to the point where they will wear similar (although not identical) clothing despite living a country away

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This is where the argument nature/nurture comes in.

Take a set of twins. Bring one to a Catholic area with guardians that are strong believers in tough discipline with little reward. Take the other twin to a not so disciplinary set of guardians in a safety-concerned area, who still want the best the child can get, but is heavily rewarded with the latest tech.

The first will grow to be a well-rounded yet cautious individual, and the other a somewhat decadent yet studious person. The two will be completely different people given their background.

If I died and they wanted to clone me, i'd be fine with it. and if I was informed right now that I was a clone, I think i'd take it pretty well, because i'm still living and breathing it wouldn't make a difference to me how I got here. I would, however, rage at the people who made me if my organs began shutting down for no reason. ,,xD

Also, I don't think cloning would replicate memories or behavioural patterns/tendencies. The thought of me being dead, and a drunken-serial-rapist-Felidire taking my place is kind of unsettling~

Edit: looks like you guys are talking about memory/behaviour.

Personality & behaviour (imo) are based on one's memories and their upbringing, I just don't see how it's even remotely possible for someone to clone that kind of thing. If they made a human clone, and tried to talk to it at the age of.. whatever, i'm pretty sure it wouldn't even know the alphabet or even how to speak properly.

When we were talking about cloning with memories, that was "flash cloning" (seen commonly in sci-fi stuff), which is creating an atom-by-atom copy of something (in this case, a person). If a genetic clone is created, no, memories will not be retained.

I don't really see why a clone would be less human or less likely to have a conscience than any other human. Just because you don't come out of some woman's womb when you're born doesn't make you any less of a person than anybody else. :\

I just wonder, though, what exactly the advantage is to cloning an entire human being? Organ cloning, I can understand... but why would making a human through cloning be preferable to making one the ordinary way? You could try cloning a genius in order to produce another genius, but, as has been pointed out by others, environment contributes a lot toward what kind of person you're going to be. :3 So just because the clone would have the same DNA, doesn't mean he'd be like the original genius. So I'm kind of scratching my head over here trying to come up with a good reason for wanting to clone someone.

Jason-Kun said:

Assuming all the atoms were cloned as well, would the clone not have the same memories and thus personality of the original, even though it never went through the same expeiriences? Thinking like that, couldn't we consider the clone to be the same being as the original?

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Not talking about flash-cloning, just so ya know

Mirry said:

I don't really see why a clone would be less human or less likely to have a conscience than any other human. Just because you don't come out of some woman's womb when you're born doesn't make you any less of a person than anybody else. :\

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As far as mammal cloning has gone so far, the clone's still born, just as a non-cloned individual would be. As far as I know (as in the case of Dolly), scientists make the genetically identical zygote, then implant it into a surrogate mother.
Science hasn't advanced far enough to make clones a la Mewtwo in the first movie just yet.

Grimdour The Desecrater said:

Life means something created with an organic system in this case, so yes.

Also, twins don't have the exact same DNA. Fingerprints, for example. They have the same sets but mixed.

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Fun fact: Identical Twins do have the exact same DNA. I know this has already been addressed, but I went to all the trouble to look this up, so I'm not going to waste it.

• Although identical twins share the same genes they do not have identical fingerprints. That's because the shape of the whorls and arches on our fingers are determined both by genes and the local environment around the dividing skin cells. So a twin's individual position in the womb will cause slight differences.

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Source: New Scientist Website

Dannichu said:

As far as mammal cloning has gone so far, the clone's still born, just as a non-cloned individual would be. As far as I know (as in the case of Dolly), scientists make the genetically identical zygote, then implant it into a surrogate mother.
Science hasn't advanced far enough to make clones a la Mewtwo in the first movie just yet.

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Ah, I do recall that being the case now -- thanks for correcting me. ^^;; I think my point still stands, though.

IT worked pretty well in star wars... wait, no it didn't.

It's not immoral to clone someone. We can clone humans. What we can't do is replicate a full set of memories and experiences and import them into another body.

(Yet. Maybe we will in the future.)

PS: It's important to note that humans are just animals like any other animal on the planet - what we can do to them we can do to ourselves.