Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Epiphenom

Home
About

Home
Nonreligious
Why cloning is yucky

Why cloning is yucky

Last updated on: April 15, 2010 at 10:10 pm by Epiphenom

Why cloning is yucky 2010-04-15T22:10:00+01:00 Epiphenom

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

A team lead by Douglass Turnbull at the Newcastle University in the UK has just announced that they have successfully transplanted a human egg nucleus into a new cell. The advance holds out the prospect that mothers with inheritable defects in their mitochondrial DNA can nonetheless give birth to healthy children.

It got a predictable denunciation from religious conservatives, who described it as:

“a further step toward tampering with the very essence of humanity, and demonstrates not just a contempt for life itself – all the embryos in this experiment were destroyed for science – but a profoundly dangerous and arrogant belief that we can tamper with the genetic makeup of our fellow human beings.” (Family Research Council)

This is a familiar theme. While many people find the idea of cloning to be disturbing or even repugnant, few people can actually put their fingers on what exactly the problem is – leaving exclamations of disgust as their only means of argument (like this from 2008 on animal hybrids).

Bioethicists who oppose human cloning have turned this into a rationale of sorts. They call it “The Wisdom of Repugnance”. If something seems intuitively wrong, that’s because we have an intuitive wisdom – even if we can’t articulate what the problem is.

Jussi Niemelä of the University of Helsinki, in a recent paper in the journal Bioethics, takes issue with this stance. He points out that cloning violates a raft of instinctive – yet wrong – intuitions about how the world works. The reason we find it yucky is that it violates our evolved ways of thinking about the world.

For example, we intuitively believe that all things – especially living things – have an essence that makes them what they are:

The cat will continue being a cat no matter how much its outer appearance might change over the years of its existence. A human baby, an adult and an elderly person with a prosthetic leg and one lung removed are all equally human, no matter how different they are morphologically. This tendency can also be called “postulation of causal essence”.

We also have intuitions about how the biological world works. For example, according to Pascal Boyer (author of “Religion Explained”) we have an animal ‘template’ that says, for example. that animals are born and not made:

Thus a skunk [concept] falls under the inferential rules of an animal [template]. This is to say that if a cat [animal] has baby cats, needs to eat, has a mind etc., then a skunk [animal] also has baby skunks, needs to eat and so on. These things need not be learned separately for each concept as long as the concepts are linked to the right template supplying the inferential framework.

These are ‘cognitive shortcuts’. Simple rules that our brains have evolved to allow us to make rapid decisions about the world around us. The problem comes when we try to apply these instinctive rules to situations that never occurred in our evolutionary past.

Folk-biological reasoning is an essentialistic, automatic and streamlined way of making sense of incredibly complex world of living kinds. The automatic cognitive tendencies are, as discussed in the section about essentialism, quick and useful in everyday life, but not necessarily correct in a scientific sense. This is why natural thinking tendencies get into all sorts of trouble when genetics are involved.

Cloning breaks the intuitive rules about biological life in a number of ways. Because clones are manufactured, folk-biological reasoning puts clones in the category of artefacts, rather than living things – and yet they are alive. They break the break the template that specifies that ‘animals’ are conceived through procreation.

Cloned organisms also break the folk-biological rule about species classification – that cats procreate and give birth to cats, cows to cows, etc.

What’s more, cloned organisms don’t appear to have an essence (or ‘soul’). As the Catholic Church says:

The spiritual soul, which is the essential constituent of every subject belonging to the human species and is created directly by God, cannot be generated by the parents, produced by artificial fertilization, or cloned. (s1060, Pontifical Academy for Life.)

So repugnance isn’t wisdom at all. It’s an intuition that something is wrong, for sure, but that intuition is driven by our evolved rules for understanding how the world works.

Cloning represents a radical deviation from the norms of reproduction and the features of living kinds human minds have evolved to understand. As such, it is not surprising that it should give rise to just these kinds of reactions: a strange, eerie feeling of something out-of-place, a fear of transgressing invisible, unspeakable yet profound boundaries etc.

And when we sense that something doesn’t fit our intuitions about the natural world, our moral system of disgust kicks in. That doesn’t mean that cloning is right, of course. But it does mean that we can’t trust our intuitions to give us a morally correct answer.

As Niemelä says, on a topic like cloning our instinctive reactions have about as much to do with wisdom or ethical thought as does a knee-jerk reflex!

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

April 12, 2010

Blood donations: religious and non-religious are equally generous

Next Post

April 18, 2010 Why religion can lead to racism

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Causes of religion - evolution Causes of religion - psychological Causes of religion - social Demographics Digest Effects of religion - health Effects of religion - psychological Effects of religion - social Notifications Politics Uncategorized

Select a Month March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What does the name "Isaac" mean?

Select your answer to see how you score.

He prays He rules He laughs He fights