CountryByNet.com Forums :: Advantage of cloning?

Jerry, You sure got an early start this year and didn't waste time on starting with the easy questions. Wow!

OK, lets see... I guess we need to handle this multi-parter one small chunk at a time. You start out with a GIANT IF. IF everything is kept in ballance by evolution... WHOAA!! I don't think so. Is everything kept in ballance by evolution? I don't understand your position on that. I thought it was pretty obvious that evolution improves or at least creates changes to better match environmental challenges/pressures through natural selection. Evolution is reactive not proactive. Evolution doesn't purposefully create and nurture a branch in anyone's family tree so that in case X happens there will be individuals better able to cope with X and survive.

Take the classic example of the giraffe. If there had been enough "short" food for everyone then a mutation or even an individual at the extreme edge of the envelope with respect to neck length might have not had a survival advantage and the giraffe would have not evolved a long neck.

Mow to the general question, "will large scale cloning effect evolution?" Well yes, I believe so but in a minor way. If a large percentage of the animals on the earth are clones then fewer animals are available to participate in evolution and as often repeated, a single problem successfully targeting a population could wipe it out due to the lack of diversity.

Simply stated evolution goes like this... In any large population of a species there are individual differences. Sometimes there are mutations that present larger that typical individual differences. These individuals compete in their environment (environment, meaning ALL their extant conditions not just weather) and some are better suited to survive and pass on their genes. Pressure can be exerted on the survivability of an individual or whole species by changes in their environment. These changes could be the arrival of a competing species that eats all the low food which rewards taller individuals with proportionally more food. The taller will be more succesful at raising young due to more abundant food supply and will pass on their genes. Lets say the taller than normal neck was a mutation. These mutated genes will be passed on better than the genes of the short neck kin who are starving due to competition for low food.

Individuals with mutant genes are often misfits and are not suerior competitors for food, habitat, or whatever but sometimes a mutant gene can cause a change that gives a competitive advantage in some respect and then it will be passed on. Mutatioins can be responsible for "leaps" in evolution. Otheriwise evolution can be rather slow. There are lots of minor variations in the intricate chemical processes of coding for various substances in a complex organism like a mamal. Some of the variants have superior survival value as regards some survival issue and some are negative or not particularly involved.

Take the evolution of milk drinkers for instance. Northern Europeans were heavier into milking cows for food than most folks, especially black Africans (except for notible exceptions like the Masai tribe. There was a distribution of ages where a person could digest milk. Milk contains milk sugar, lactose, which is broken down by the enzyme lactase which most folks produce sufficiently so they can nurse their mothers and survive. There is no survival value to producing the lactase enzyme very far past weening age UNLESS milk is a valuable portion of your diet. In populations were milk drinking as an adult is not popoular there is no survival value to an adult's production of lactase to enable lastose digestion.

Northern Europeans (and certain others) relied on milk as adult food and the individuals who could digest it had a better chance of survival so over time they evolved, in the main, to be able to digest milk into old age. Most black Africans can't digest milk. The Masai sell milk products at market to other tribes but only in the forms of cheese and yogurt where the milk sugar has been chemically processed by bacteria.

I loved milk and drank huge quantities as a lad but am now lactose intollerant (since about 25 years of age or so) and have to take a lactase supplement if I want to drink milk. You can buy pretreated milk too. So, I was marginalized by the evolutionary process and had it not been for food science industry producing lactase enzyme pills I wouild have not been able to use milk as a food.

Since evolution uses natural selection to better fit the breed to the environment and since clones are not likely to be used extensively for breeding they are sort of out of it, standing to one side and not involved in evolution. Why make clones in order to breed them? The case of the "Prize Bull" sounds attractive on the surface but the bull would have a higher probabability of having genetic defects in its sperm than the animal from whch it was cloned. AI sounds like a beter investment for producing a herd bull than cloning. Cloning may become the method of choice for end user consumption with only single generation cloning.

I'm sure the cloninig researchers and their money sources have their eyes way over the horizon that stops youi and I from seeing what all they are hoping for. I'm sure I am way underinformed about the hopes and aspirations of cloners. Who knows maybe one day we can clone body parts specificly for an individual and not have rejection problems. How about a new young strong heart for an aged heart patient tht is essentially HIS heart, just newer?

I'm sorry for all the misspellings. Big fingers, haste, and an overabundance of fresh large dark floaters are only some of my excuses. I'll try to be a better netizen (not misspelled) next time.

Pat

"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"

Edited by Pat (01/02/07 04:07 PM)

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