> Do you expect that under such circumstances you would have the legal
> right to harvest your twin brother's organs for transplant into your own
> aging body?
>
Let's say that I need to harvest the organs to continue to live.
Hell yes, I'd be dieing!!!!
To put this another way ... Say I had a lot of money, and I needed a
liver. Say there was someone in Haiti whose family was desperately poor,
but who had a liver that I could use. Would I give that person's family
some of my money and then kill that person his liver. Yep.
If you have a problem with that why don't you look at all the ways
you are INDIRECTLY committing the same crime. Let's start with all that
shit that you buy that's made with child labor, and then let's move on to
all that shit that you have that's made with irreplaceable resources. I
would guess that unless you're Mother Theresa I do at least as much as you
to make sure the world is a better place than when I came into it .... On
the other hand, I'm realistic about the point of diminishing returns ... If
all American's were me the entire world would have a living standard
comperable to rural Canada, and we'd be on our way to Alpha-Centauri. VOTE
NATE KING OF THE WORLD ...
>Only if our legislators are so insane as to define "inalienable
rights"
>in such a fashion as to deny them to people who have only one
genetic
>parent.
Exactly ... the sanity of legislators is proportional to the sanity
of whoever is pulling their strings by stuffing money up their ass.
>> Imagine a "build a clone kit" that you could buy at
>> Walmart - you would replicate DNA taken from say cells from your
cheek.
>> Then you would embed that DNA in an artificially produced egg.
Finally
>> you'd place the egg in your clone-a-matic which I can imagine
looking a lot
>> like a bread maker. (Actually you'd probably just put your
starting cells
>> in your clone-a-matic).
>More likely you'd put the developing embrio into a woman's uterus.
Yeah that's cool ... pay someone couple of K to grow me a new liver
wrapped in a baby's body.
> > My point here is that social stratifications atomize humanity by
> > creating the distinction between us and them. A really succesful
> memetic
> > engineer <ala the bad popes, or Ronald Reagan's handlers> tries to apply
> > these stratifications recursively ... with the engineer being at the
> center
> > of the layers of "usness".
>
>I hope you can see that the above paragraph describes an aspect of
the
>human condition which far predates the discovery of DNA and the
concept
>of cloning.
Yeah, a lot of why I'm playing devil's advocate here is to generate
a distasteful ... but perhaps viable (when technology allows for it) meme
... as an example of what memetic engineering is about. I think to deny
the existence of memes <ala Polichak from a week or two ago> is to leave the
future to the most successful memetic engineers <even if they call
themselves "spin doctors", or "public relations consultants".> On the
other hand I certainly don't think that natural selection is a benevolent
force. To pretend that attitudes like the above won't evolve from our
TV-basted consumer culture seems equally oblivious.