Alright, let me try to make my thought clearer not that I don’t understand what you’re saying. Keep in mind this is how I view DNA at the moment so it may be wrong and I guess I looking forward to finding out where my error lays.
So DNA is the blueprint right? Now the blueprint says two arms but why does it grow into a stump instead of a arm? I can see that the body can’t just regrow an arm the instant its been cut off but wouldn’t it grow back over the years if the blueprints demand it?
Okay so it’s a stump now, and if you cut it (like a scratch, not a major opening), the skin will regrow into the stump, not the arm. If it’s reforming the stump, doesn’t that mean it’s following the blueprint to make a stump? If that’s the case, then the cells in that area would be “damaged”.
I know that it’s more complicated than that but at a simplified level, isn’t that how it works? So to test that would be to compare the DNA of the stump with the arm prove my theory right or wrong assuming that the process of comparing DNA is accurate.
DNA has nothing to do with your arm after you’ve initially grown it. If it gets cut off later, all that happens is that the wound heals over like any other.
To try to explain what I believe you’re asking, to put it very simply, think of genes as switches. Some are on, some are off. Some come on at the moment of conception. Some come on at various points in time. Each gene or group of genes has specific tasks to perform. Some genes, when they come on they stay on until you die, but some come on, do their jobs and shut off for good. An example of this is the process of development from the stages of cell to zygote to fetus to baby to toddler to adolescent to adult. The sequence of genes in the DNA that cause the buds of a mature zygote to develop into arms and legs turn off once that has been achieved in the fetal stage. If, during childhood, you lose your arm you will not grow it back because the sequence of genes giving the instruction to grow an arm are no longer active.
Even if the DNA in a bunch of cells in one spot in your arm are all damaged – which is highly unlikely – there still isn’t any way for those damages to make their way back to your reproductive cells. The worst that will happen is you get cancer. Otherwise, those cells just die and you still reproduce using the DNA you were born with, plus or minus the occasional, very rare mutation in your sperm or egg DNA.
In other words, you can beat the crap out of your house, but no matter what you do to it, you can always find the blueprints and build a new house just like yours used to be. Because the damages to your house don’t magically appear on the blueprint; the blueprint stays the same.
To the extent that cloning acts against genetic diversity, I’m totally against it. All we need is some superflu to wipe out twice as many people as it would otherwise. Apart from that… CLONE PARTY!
Well that’s what I’m saying. I’m saying that if the arm cells are damaged, they wouldn’t affect the reproductive cells so just because an amputee can give birth to a child with all the normal parts, it doesn’t mean his DNA where his stump is, isn’t damaged. Although Onomatopoeia answered that with an analogy.
I know you’re using an analogy here, but wouldn’t it be smart to look for a way to flip that switch back on?
In the chaos of war, the edge a superathlete (or super-genius) would enjoy over an ordinary soldier simply isn’t big enough to justify the cost and time needed to raise cloned soldiers. Guys like Phelps and Armstrong (and um, there’s a good reason why you wouldn’t want to clone Armstrong) can walk over the competition in a controlled environment where their opponents are constrained in what they can do by the rules of the game. That doesn’t apply in war.
There’s really no evidence that those kinds of behavioral patterns are genetically coded. Even if they were, I’m still skeptical that the perfect soldier in that regard would be so much better than the graduate of a well-designed boot camp to be worth the cost and effort.
Think about it, which would you rather have: A single perfect soldier, or an entire regiment of normal soldiers who are about, say, 85% as good as him? Because that’s about the cost difference we’re talking about here.
Even if you cloned what you thought would be a perfect sniper, he would have to raised, fed, trained and educated to be so. Any variance in any one variable would yield something else. You can not program a human that well.
Yes, biologists are trying to figure out how to do that. Some amphibians are able to regenerate limbs.
Also, since we’re talking about DNA in general, we are just beginning to understand how epigenetics works. Environmental factors can change how genes are expressed, even if the genes themselves don’t change.
There are many research projects under way throughout the world, some quite promising, to try to figure out why genes do what they do and how to affect them, as well as the recently realized importance of the spaces between genes.
Oh I see. This thread has been very informational though we strayed from the topic lol.
Menocchio: *There’s really no evidence that those kinds of behavioral patterns are genetically coded. Even if they were, I’m still skeptical that the perfect soldier in that regard would be so much better than the graduate of a well-designed boot camp to be worth the cost and effort.
Think about it, which would you rather have: A single perfect soldier, or an entire regiment of normal soldiers who are about, say, 85% as good as him? Because that’s about the cost difference we’re talking about here.*
What about a genetically superior soldier trained under the same well-designed boot camp? The cost would not be pocket change and requires commitment throughout the years but I think the benefits are better than you present. They could probably train multiple simultaneously, than one, so comparing let’s say 100 superiors to 100,000 mediocre of I’d reckon close to 50-70% worse.
Is it likely to happen? Probably not. Would it be worth it? Probably not. Has the government done crazy things that don’t make perfect sense? Probably did.
In the end, the possibility is still there. By the way, I’m for cloning. The positives may outweigh the negatives and I guess the important thing is to persuade people of that.
Unless you live in a totalitarian regime, you can’t force people to be soldiers (form birth) if they don’t want to be. We don’t breed soldiers now, so why would try and clone them later? Sure, we’ve had a draft before, but what would it take to have a selective draft for only people who have been cloned? North Korea, maybe, but not any Western country.
“I have a clever idea ! Let’s clone the best soldiers we have, and we’ll have a huge number of people we can treat as disposable ! Then, we give them guns and military training ! What could go wrong ?” - Recording recovered from 30 BCR ( Before Clone Revolution )
Some researchers are, but trying to reopen a long-closed switch is proving more difficult and less promising than just installing new, unflipped switches, hence the potential of stem-cells.
That’s always bugged me about “perfect soldier” fiction. Rather than go to ridiculous expense to culture a clone soldier from conception and through decades of training and indoctrination, just have a volunteer army and foster a culture of competition. If you’ve a population of, for example, 300 million, by some wild estimation:
Five percent of the population is in the military: 1.5 million
Five percent of those are really really good at at: 75000
Five percent of those are elite level: 3750
Five percent of those are super-mega-elite: 187
Give these 187 advanced weaponry and whatnot, and you’ll have as “super” a bunch of soldiers as you’re likely to need. Frankly, it’d be dumb to spend $50 million to genetically create the ultimate soldier only to have his head blown off by a 12 year-old wielding an AK-47 in some African conflict zone.
