Clone This

[Almighty Colin]

Cloning = asexual reproduction.

There's a reason why sexual reproduction evolved. Asexual reproduction
seems like it should be superior to sexual for a species, for many it is. If you imagine two populations - one that uses sexual reproduction and one that uses asexual, you will realize that every generation the asexual species will have more offspring than the sexual because every child can reproduce.

So sexual reproduction must have some huge cost benefit for it to have appeared in mammals (and others). There are many theories about this - one popular one of which is Bill Hamilton's. Basically his theory states that sexual reproduction leads to the storing of copies of genes that have no survival value currently but may in the future. Some day, some killer virus comes and some people luckily had the right immune system to deal with it because of recombination. Species that reproduce sexually will end up with better disease resistance than if they didn't. There are other theories too. Matt Ridley's book "The Red Queen" is excellent and on this topic.

I don't know what we're going to do with our cloning knowledge or how it will benefit mankind. It will be interesting. Maybe we will find an advantage in asexual reproduction.

There have been a few claims in the past few years that people have been cloned but they were false. The difficulty is that the success rate of clones in other mammals has been something like 1 in 200. So did Antinori have some failures first or did he invent a new method out of the blue somehow or maybe he is lying.