A while back in the blogosphere there was discussion about the ethics of cloning oneself. I’d imagine raising a clone of yourself would be like Groundhog Day, where you can predict your clone-child’s flaws and tailor a parenting style that would minimize their defects. Let’s say a clone-son would be shy. The father could then set about getting the clone-son accustomed to socially mingling with large groups of people at an early age. Or he could introduce the kid to liquor in grammar school. If you are a woman with a clone-daughter and you know she’s going to take after your big nose, you can start saving up money now for the rhinoplasty she’ll have just before the cruel junior high school years.
Maybe a more intriguing question is what other people we would want cloned. Thought experiment: if you had the power to clone an infinite number of times one person from the following list of people, who would you choose?
- Isaac Newton
- Gandhi
- Muhammad Ali
- Genghis Khan
- Bach
- Michelangelo
- Sergey Brin
- Kurt Cobain
- Margaret Thatcher
- Melissa Theuriau
An army of Newtons would probably be best for the world in a materialist sense, but there’s no doubt who I would have cloned into a vast standing army of pleasurebots. Is there a better reflection of our values than who we would choose to clone besides ourselves?
Myself. No question.
After me, Bach.
You don’t need cloning to produce an army of pleasurebots. For that, we only need a properly intentioned system of eugenics that pairs off hot young Susan Sarandon types with handsome Italian directors to produce an endless stream of Eva Amurri’s (last I heard, that kind of market-based eugenics takes place pretty frequently…)
More examples: hottest mother daughter film stars:
http://forum.santabanta.com/showthread.htm?t=179975
Hmm. What would endlessly cloning pleasurebots do to the culture of competition for pleasurebots? Is there any important detail or flaw in this plan that we must look past our, er, nose to see? Maybe not.
Pupu
I’d go for the infinite number of Newton clones and assign them the task of developing a line of high quality, affordable sex-bots.
Newton.
I’ve got to go with the Newton as well. A ground-breaking innovative scientist just seems like the best thing for society. The rest of the list consists of entertainers and leaders; both of which are a dime a dozen in comparision to the likes of Isaac.
Genghis did a better job of spreading his genes than anyone else in history, no need to clone him.
Bach did pretty well too.
I’d have to go with Newton to ensure the advance of science and technology to the point where the robots will do everything for us and we never have to work.
If you have to choose a TV personality, Melissa is definitely the one I’d pick, but she has already been cloned multiple times, you can see hundreds of women with different names who look exactly like her in web ads all over the internet….
gandhi, muhammad ali and kurt cobain? rofl
the only reason to clone them would be to be able to keep killing them and desecrating their stupid worthless bodies over and over again
There are diffrerent metrics here – scientific advancement, aesthetics/art, political leadership. My personal fave would obviously be Bach, but for the good of the species I’d have to say Newton first, then Thatcher (so many socialist shitholes to put on the right path, so little time), then Bach. The other political leader-types (Gandhi, Genghis) are of the wrong type, and the Melissa Theurieus take care of themselves from generation to generation – there’s a reliable supply of pretty girls, and they are far less rare than genius of the kind that drives progress. Some of the others (Cobain? Ali?) are kind of silly.
The early guys had no competition. They picked up the low hanging fruit. Whoop-de-doo. The worst running back in the NFL today is better than the best one (Jim Brown) way back in the day, as the competition and game is so much more intense now.
Therefore Mr. Brin is the answer (though I hear Page is smarter). Or Thatcher. She came late in a long line of fascists.
In the realm of dating science:
“The Pill Linked to Low Libido in Women”
http://www.livescience.com/health/birth-control-female-libido-100505.html
“25 Percent of U.S. Women Don’t Care if They Get Pregnant”
http://www.livescience.com/culture/women-pregnancy-ambivalent-100506.html
Isaac Newton has the advantage of having been a life-long virgin (and proud!) and a religious nut. Therefore, he would not be competing with you for women, but would be smart enough to help the holographic-5D-sexbot revolution along.
Michaelangelo, who was gay or chaste or whatever, seems like a good choice since again he would not be competing for women, but would spend his time helping sculpt the holographic-5D-sexbots for the revolution.
Sergey Brin? dude what the fuck this dude created a fucking search engine(jewgle), not really that great, and he didn’t even do it on his own you forgot about larry page. These guys are rich off fucking advertising for fucks sakes, lets clone Rupert murdoch and Bill Gates while we’re at it, such great products they produce and such fair business men they are lozlzolzozlzolzolzoz Rich fuckers could probably start cloning themselves right now they’ve got enough cashmoney
Kurt Cobain? Fucking fuck curt cobain dude the clones would have a low enough life expectancy as it is.
haha Genghis khan ok but lets keep them in a cage just to be safe lest they kill us and fuck our girls.
and fuck that no more female politicians please….
Gotta be Newton or else add leonardo da vinci to the list. And what about the greek philosophers, einstein etc
There would probably be diminishing returns to various clones, so this depends on how many clones we are making. You might want to start with Newton, but he was more than a bit nuts. You probably wouldn’t want to many running around. Science is so corrupted today that the most brilliant people often add little to society, sad as that may be. Still more than stupid people, though.
Ghengis Khan was an efective administrator which god knows the word needs. However, the world certainly doesn’t need millions of little GKs (although from genetic evidence it appears it already has them).
Michaelangelo is great, but could he make movies?
If I had to clone just one person infinite times as the question suggests, it would be the hot chick. The marginal hot chick would just about never go negative.
We should clone an army of Abe Vigoda’s. Humanity would be unstoppable. Unstoppable.
Nicola Tesla. He has a lot of unfinished work they are reinvestigating currently.
Bruce Lee. Send an army of him to go fight terrorists around the world.
Jesus Christ. He needs to set some people straight, specifically Christians.
Raising one’s own clone-child would be like the highest expression of the Selfish Gene (read ground breaking book by Richard Dawkins of the same name).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
Given that one’s instinct for Altruism is proven to be strongest amongst relatives (50% genetic overlap with offspring, parents, and on-average amonst siblings), such a parent-child relationship would be the strongest ever given the 100% genetic overlap.
It has been almost 14 years since Dolly, and I am surprised on Billionaire has attempted this yet. Perhaps some have, and it’s a secret.
This ….for the win.
Definitely clone a batch of Newtons — and throw in some Einsteins as well. Newton was a jerk during his life (not in the Game sense, but an actual jerk), but that may have been the result of living among beings unable to understand him at all. A human kid raised by chimps would probably seem like a jerk to the chimps.
Solzhenitsyn for wisdom
Walesa for courage
Wojtyla for piety
Tesla for brains
Pudzianowski for alpha
Tchaikovsky for talent
Dostoyevsky for soul
Porizkova for beauty
Newton had more real-life chops than you might think. Read “Newton and the Counterfeiter”. Not only was he a detective even smarter than Sherlock Holmes, he saved Britain from a financial collapse.
psy ops?! excellent category. I’d opt for #5.
“PA
Solzhenitsyn for wisdom
Walesa for courage
Wojtyla for piety
Tesla for brains
Pudzianowski for alpha
Tchaikovsky for talent
Dostoyevsky for soul
Porizkova for beauty”
I wonder what part of the world you are from?
A clone of yourself would be the same as having a twin as a baby. You wouldn’t be literally making a copy of yourself.
Anyway, I’d clone an army of Fedor Emeliankenos.
@Jabberwocky
yeah lets clone Stalin and Trotsky while we’re at it so i can kick them in the nutz
Newton. Then, when my army of Newtons had removed all the money from the coffers of Goldie Stix and DE Shaw, I’d buy an army of pleasurebots for Newton and I.
We pick on the U.S. a lot here, but luckily it is one of the few industrialized countries that HAS NOT BANNED cloning:
http://cnx.org/content/m14834/latest/
Other industrialized countries that also haven’t banned cloning include China, South Korea, Singapore, New Zealand, Finland, Belgium.
Sorry to say for our commenter PA, but it appears the Russian Federation HAS BANED human cloning. Sorry Comrade.
… by “cloning” above I meant “human cloning”.
With the way Feminism growing in power the clones of Melissa Theuriau wouldn’t even probably look like her.
They will all have wider jaw’s and probably be more fat and bitchy so essentially you are are creating an army of monsters who will rob poor men of livelyhood after the divorce.
An offspring should always be superior to one’s self and environment plays a big role in its development.
Roissy has such a jones for French girls.
Newton was a religious nut as one poster has noted. Not only was he hooked on the Book of Revelations and other esoteric portions of the Bible (taught himself Hebrew to divine the depths of The Book of Daniel), he was a cruel, know-it-all son of a bitch. His petulant feud with Hooke and Huygens over the nature of light is example enough.
What you’d get with a bunch of Newton clones is a tedious, albeit organized, growth in the millenerian/neoconservative/the-middle-east-is-the-navel-of-the-world camp that tended more toward Cromwell than harmless geniuses thinking great thoughts.
From that list? Genghis Khan!! It’d be the mongol invasions all over again… awesome to the max
Ghandi. But tweak him a little to give him a huge drive (and advantage) to reproduce.
The world needs fewer assholes.
PA is Polish. And Jabberwocky, pray tell, what part of the world gave us both Solzhenitsin and Tesla? (The answer had better be “Europe.”)
Am I the only one who’s fantasized about cloning a female version of himself?
I bet I’d be incredible in bed.
But would there be chemistry? Probably not as I’d smell too much like myself, and I hear we get most attracted to the scent of a very different immune system.
Jay
A clone of yourself would be the same as having a twin as a baby. You wouldn’t be literally making a copy of yourself.
And here I was imagining setting up a lab similar to Rocky Horror’s Frankenfurter. Boy, was I way off!
Rosario Dawson, Salma Hayek, Halle Berry …
Besides having more of them, their negotiating position would be lowered from the ridiculous height they’ve had.
One’s chances of getting one of them would go way up.
Yes, that’s right, I ‘dare’ to be a mindless hedonist. Yum.
i choose maggie thatcher. her patriarchal values would go a long way toward restoring the beauty metric by encouraging femininity across the board.
newton was a big dog too; i read about him in one of those neal stephenson books.
and if we’re cheating and not using the list, i’d want some teenage versions of dana running around.
Solzhenitsyn is my nr one fav author. Clone him please!
On the list, Michel Angelo.
Euler
Melissa Theuriau looks like a mannequin. Her eyebrows are too perfect. Take away the make-up and what have you got: a 12 yr old boy.
Now these two babes I could do, preferably together:
http://www.lanephotography.com/newfoundland_swimwear/irish_flag/irish_flag_swimwear_12.jpg
Euler? I hardly even know her!
I’d like to see a clone-combo of these three:
John von Neumann
Darwin
Fedor Emelianenko
Ehhh… since obtaining a true clone of oneself requires not only the biological part but also the correct social environment I think most clones from 1 to 9 wont work properly… number 10 doesn’t need the latter
I would clone Roissy! Original Roissy can rule the world and clone Roissy would be the love of my life!
(so evil)
Jesus Christ
Newton was a selfish dick who constantly insulted his rivals. His famous quote “If I have achieved anything, it is only through standing on the shoulders of giants” was written in a letter to a scientific rival who was of short stature / a midget. I.e. it was a not so thinly veiled insult to the guy telling him he thought his work was shit.
So much for the modesty it is thought to portray.
I vote for Ghandi or Bach. Michaelangelo was gay and Genghis Khan already has his genes in 10% of the world population or something, so he hardly needs it.
Maybe Ali in third place. The rest of them aren’t that great in their achievements.
Oh, I would also clone Tupac. There can never be enough pretty in this world. Aaand I would clone Cannon, only so I could put him under, take out his brain and plop it into my own head! Oh, and I would clone my mom. She’s awesome!
Jacko,
I like your taste in women.
the realist
@Jabberwocky
“yeah lets clone Stalin and Trotsky while we’re at it so i can kick them in the nutz”
Marx could use a swift one too. Not to go off topic but Adam could’ve used game to keep Eve in check complete with matching snake skin loincloths.
I would like to clone enough Kurt Cobains for every woman in America to have one. And then get a big bowl of popcorn.
A bunch of alphas suddenly reduced to pussyless penury, as warpigs have the bitch shields of 10s, secure in the knowledge that Kurt, the ideal combination of alpha and beta, is waiting at home, ready to brood about his tragic past then fuck them into submission. The betas and newly-bereft alphas combine into a single Fight-Club-esque organization and destroy civilization, leading to the end of the world as we know it. None of the women notice because, seriously, Kurt Cobain, do you expect us to pay attention to little issues like the apocalypse?
Plus the music scene would fucking rock.
Newton. If he was exhumed could dna be extracted. The clone kid could appear in a Truman Show type thing. “Today young Isaac unknotted string theory and invalidated Stephen Hawkings life work. Isaac said: ‘i picked up the baton from Stephen’”.
Why Bach? I want Stravinsky!
Khan
If the world is going to hell anyway, why not hasten the process?
@PA
Nice list, albeit I’ll take Chopin over Tchaikovsky any day. And anyone who suggest he was French will receive some crabs in the mail.
the world wont take another bach.
daVinci, Tesla, Einstein, Newton, the Bernoullis, Turing, Julius Caesar.
As for chicks Cleopatra and Helen of Troy just to see what the broads that caused men to go to war looked like.
Out of the musicians I’d clone Mozart because his reaction to today’s music would be most interesting. What would he compose in response of he was presented with what his original composed and also with the music composed since then?
Out of the scientists I’d clone Richard Feynman because he’d be way more entertaining and also because we need his advice.
Next comes the beauties.
Just how attractive was the Pope’s daughter Lucrezia Borgia? I’d like to see.
Also, bring back Mae West. We need a woman with her attitude toward men. She would be a very welcome relief from the feminists.
But who was the sexiest woman of the 20th century?
you know who Melissa Theuriau is married to? A short one-armed arab-french comedian named Jamel Debouzze
http://www.purepeople.com/media/melissa-theuriau-et-jamel-debbouze_m205417
Appeal against Melissa Theuriau’s marriage:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=12114160095
“Melissa Theuriau is without doubt the hottest girl on the planet. I for one would climb a 70ft pole and run naked over broken glass just to wank in her feathers shadow, she is THAT hot…
For whatever reason she has decided to marry some little Arab fella, with apparantly ONE ARM. No offence to one armed people intended, honestly, but we are talking about a 10/10 STUNNER going out with a 2 at best, on comic value alone apparantly, deformed dwarf …. something is not right, and I intend to take this to an arbitration panel and get the marriage over turned
If she is going to marry someone ugly – then why not me?! … this is an outrage, if required, this will go to the top, the European courts …”
He’s known for being an annoying arabocentric whiner. Maybe it’s the asshole flavor in today’s Paris but I don’t think he can be considered alpha. Often when you’re a celebrity the pool of potential mates can be rather small for all kinds of different reasons.
Anyway, she’s all set to throw her genes in the sewer so yes we should clone her. I have the feeling her child will be as ugly as Heidi Klum’s little troll
My cunt
as an earlier poster alluded to… Ghengis Khan was king alpha in terms of descendants. He’s responsible for about 16 Million of the world’s male population…. it’s hard to beat that… I agree with Roissy with on Melissa Theuriau. Genius has severely limited utility in this age of civilization.
Melissa would be on the list to clone. France 24 generally has sexy moderators. And France has sexy feminine women for the most part. I always enjoy shopping for clothes with my wife in France and chatting up the salesgirls. If you speak some French, you will get a lot of mileage out of it.
Just to remind everyone who wants to clone Newton, which BTW, I think is a good choice, that Newton was both a devout Christian and an astrologer. Would his mind go in the direction we all think it would? Cloning may not work as we expect it to.
Newton. The most brilliant intellect of all time, though I might be tempted to go with Alexis Bledel instead.
Muhammed Ali: No.
If you cloned the frog, you would surely get tired of her shit at some point. Then what are your options?
(regarding Newton) “he was a cruel, know-it-all son of a bitch. His petulant feud with Hooke and Huygens over the nature of light is example enough.”
He sounds a bit Alpha, and you sound a bit gamma/bitch.
Cruel? Petulant? The pwned ( and pwned-at-heart) always whine like that.
Give me Leonardo Da Vinci, but I’d take Newton as second choice. Pretty girls aren’t that hard to find, but real genius, on the other hand…
thanks for information , keep writing thanks for sharing
Umm, Roissy I hate to break it to you, but Kurt Cobain has already been cloned many many times. It’s called popular music from 1993 to about 2004.
It doesn’t follow that a clone of Newton would today achieve great accomplishments. He would undoubtedly sail through phd programs and find it easy to write papers, but it’s doubtful that these papers would be as revolutionary or anywhere near as important as his bygone twin’s accomplishment.
Why do we assume that people who are just as smart as Isaac Newton aren’t around today?
A cloned Newton would probably just be another Terrence Tao.
“Also, bring back Mae West. We need a woman with her attitude toward men. She would be a very welcome relief from the feminists.”
But she would be raised in today’s environment and would therefore imbibe feminist values.
Are you kidding? What’s unfeminist about May West? Isn’t she just an older timey version of Bette Middler? Playing the vamp is perfectly in accordance with feminist values. Or pre-feminist values. It’s straightforward entrepreneurial enthusiasm.
May west was hardly all about the family values.
Wasn’t it the case that Newton had little personal drive to solve mathematical and scientific puzzles, but when asked questions would very quickly find the outlandishly novel solutions?
It seems collaboration really is essential to most progress and good works. Writers need editors, scientists need funding and and product development and marketting, and most of us don’t ask ourselves our own questions, but only think through dialogue.
The thinking process is rather static in Isolation. Throw a Neuton clone at a tough problem and he’d crack it, but don’t expect him to come up with what the tough problems are that need cracking.
If I could only choose one from the list, it would have to be Bach. The man brought so much beauty into the world, and has made the contemplation and background music for a fair bit of science and art.
If I could, I’d clone all the great classical composers just to see what they would do with modern instruments and technology.
Gandhi, no question about that,
That’s easy: Michelangelo. Thatcher a distant second.
xsplat,
You’re mistaken about Newton. He had an unquenchable drive to figure out how the world worked, but he didn’t care about writing up and polishing his results unless others prodded him. Once he had published something, he was ferocious in defending it, but the major influence on him others had was in getting him to publish in the first place, not in suggesting directions for research. Though he would amuse himself by responding anonymously when someone posed a mathematical question publicly, and was exposed by the power of his solutions (Jacob Bernoulli said famously in one such instance “I recognize the lion by his paw”).
Tesla did much more for humanity than either of these clowns.
Also there´s the obvious reason.
Polymath – thanks for the education.
I rarely read books, and the science and history and biography channels are all aimed at first year high school students. It’s tiring having the same introduction to whatever 101 over and over. BBC knowledge at least has production values and a broader scope than just blowing shit up.
Online science mags are a fun read, but wouldn’t the world be a better place if curious and intelligent people had some sort of educational TV aimed at us?
You’d think that the biography channel would consider someone like Neuton worthy of covering. Instead they cover entertainment media royalty.
Da Vinci. Period
Carl Friedrich Gauss. If one had to guess who the man with the highest IQ who ever lived was, there isn’t a better choice.
Eric,
That’s a good choice. The 3 top mathematicians ever, by common consensus, are Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss. Any one of those 3 would be my pick (all made tremendous contributions to science and technology as well as math).
Forget Newton, clone Leibniz.
I think Sergey’s the only one on the list who has built something significant.
Cloning someone for their brains would only result in a person with the potential for intelligence , not an instant genius.
Melissa Theuriau , well with her clone you know exactly what you are getting.
Clone a few thousand and sell her to Chinese billionaires as a limited edition western concubine.
It would have the additional benefit of diluting those prevalent Chinese ugly genes.