> The difference between my twin and my clone is that my parents
> incurred the costs for delivery and educating my twin. A clone seems more
> like a product then a person ...
Suppose your twin had been removed from your mother's uterus very early
in it's development and frozen or otherwise placed in suspended
animation. Suppose further that, as an adult, you, at your own expense,
have that embrio placed in a surrogate mother and brought to term. You
would pay for all lab procedures, you would pay the surrogate mother,
and you would pay for the delivery and education of your twin. Once your
much younger twin was grown and educated, he would be indistinguishable
from a clone both genetically and in his financial indebtedness to you.
Do you expect that under such circumstances you would have the legal
right to harvest your twin brother's organs for transplant into your own
aging body?
> Note this is certainly a nice proof for the
> existence of memes. It seems that depending on how you spin the production
> a clone could have the same human rights as a tissue sample or it could be
> an actual human being.
No, it doesn't. The fact that your parents bore the expense of your own
production does not mean that your own rights could be downgraded to
that of a tissue sample should your parents decide that such is your
primary value to them.
> Clones are the counter example for the concept of
> "inalienable rights".
Only if our legislators are so insane as to define "inalienable rights"
in such a fashion as to deny them to people who have only one genetic
parent.
> Imagine a "build a clone kit" that you could buy at
> Walmart - you would replicate DNA taken from say cells from your cheek.
> Then you would embed that DNA in an artificially produced egg. Finally
> you'd place the egg in your clone-a-matic which I can imagine looking a lot
> like a bread maker. (Actually you'd probably just put your starting cells
> in your clone-a-matic).
More likely you'd put the developing embrio into a woman's uterus.
> My point here is that social stratifications atomize humanity by
> creating the distinction between us and them. A really succesful memetic
> engineer <ala the bad popes, or Ronald Reagan's handlers> tries to apply
> these stratifications recursively ... with the engineer being at the center
> of the layers of "usness".
I hope you can see that the above paragraph describes an aspect of the
human condition which far predates the discovery of DNA and the concept
of cloning.
Take care.
-KMO