Re: Amusing anti-cloning arguments

Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Wed, 28 Oct 1998 12:20:10 +0000

At 11:24 AM 10/28/98 +1100, Jason Soon wrote:

>I too find this argument laughable and don't see how Damien could object
>to Max characterising it as such.

Let me beat this dead horse completely to death. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I didn't pick up the idea of government coercion in Max's original report. The reason I suggested an element of double-think in his report was straightforward, but in error (due, I suspect, to the brevity of Max's report). This list often enthuses over prospects of massive interventions and improvements in the genome, yet Max *appeared* to be saying that drastic genomic engineering, per se, was a laughable notion - when posited by an ideological opponent.

I agree that pseudo-fears such as the farming of clones to serve as spares or organ banks is preposterous, given the current climate of opinion, and I said so in no uncertain terms in a scathing review (in the New York Review of Science Fiction) of Michael Marshall Smith's scare-mongering best-seller horror novel SPARES.

Damien Broderick