Bad news for Duncan Idaho

[Willie the Duck]

I have never understood the value of clones except in very particular (probably unethical) medical circumstances. otherwise, if you can clone, you can just fertilize eggs.

I remember when Dolly the sheep first happened, there was a editorial cartoon in the local paper. In it, an excited scientist is holding a newspaper with the headline and loudly exclaiming "now we can reproduce without having sex!" The tagline was "another solution in search of a problem."

 

[Swanosaurus]

As well as Star Wars (and a number of other sci-fi stories that involve cloning) which implies or outright states that you need the original donor cells on hand to make viable clones.

Isn't that how they did it on Dune? Producing one ghola after the other from the original?

 

[Reynard]

View attachment 432960View attachment 432959

Deep cut!

 

[GMMichael]

Humans needed to clone something 58 times to see why mutation and Darwinism have worked for eons?

 

[timbannock]

Humans needed to clone something 58 times to see why mutation and Darwinism have worked for eons?

But the 59th time will be SO DIFFERENT!

 

[Kaodi]

What does it even mean for a clone to have three times as many mutations as an offspring that is only half of the original?

Anyway what it sounds like is that we need a new study to determine whether you can intersperse cloning and natural reproduction indefinitely while maintaining stability.

 

[Reynard]

The real important aspect of this finding is the strong suggestion that sexual reproduction manages to fix errors in transcription that cloning does not catch. I wonder if this is simply because there is, well, less transcription.

 

[GMMichael]

The real important aspect of this finding is the strong suggestion that sexual reproduction manages to fix errors in transcription that cloning does not catch. I wonder if this is simply because there is, well, less transcription.

It's probably because sexual reproduction produces the errors anyway, and those errors are called evil by the parents/community, who then float those errors down the river so the gods can decide what to do with them.

Dog breeding is quite a bit older than cloning, and has already resulted in the perfect organism:

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Isn't that how they did it on Dune? Producing one ghola after the other from the original?

Given how far into the future we're getting Duncan Idahos (thousands of years), I think they have to be using at least some copies of the original as source material for later gholas.