I read Brave New World a month ago. I was wondering what everyone thought got of a society where everyone is a clone of one male and one female. What problems do you foresee? I can see disease is a problem with infectious disease due to a small gene pool.
Movies would suck.
Quote from: BettaPonic on January 08, 2017, 07:06:51 PM
I read Brave New World a month ago. I was wondering what everyone thought got of a society where everyone is a clone of one male and one female. What problems do you foresee? I can see disease is a problem with infectious disease due to a small gene pool.
Any small environmental change could cause extinction.
Genetic bottlenecks are not a good thing.
Quote from: BettaPonic on January 08, 2017, 07:06:51 PMI was wondering what everyone thought got of a society where everyone is a clone of one male and one female. What problems do you foresee? I can see disease is a problem with infectious disease due to a small gene pool.
Their descendants would almost certainly die off after a few generations. There's a reason why there's a taboo regarding incest.
Bare minimum, you'd need a couple hundred people to not wind up looking like a Duck Dynasty audience after a couple of generations. Ideally, you'd need several thousand, if not ten thousand or more.
This isn't idle curiosity - space agencies have been planning on establishing space colonies, (http://www.space.com/26603-interstellar-starship-colony-population-size.html) and it's important to know how many colonists you need to have to avoid a genetic bottleneck.
Cloning was covered in a scifi episode once, story was pretty negative (they were needing to steal some DNA from the protagonists). All they needed to do was ask.
Bioethics is very serious, but techno-utopians don't take ethics seriously, if it challenges their patents, their IPO, their connection to military bio-warfare, their connection to the MIC (medical industrial complex).
I expect people have or will try human cloning, as a way to make more easily available, cheaper, organ transplants. This has been done in many fictions. Cloning of animals and plants have the difficulty that was mentioned by previous posters. The Irish potato famine comes to mind.