Dolly the sheep is not losing much sleep over woolly issues of self-identity, but in the week since she trotted out onto the world stage as the first mammalian clone, scientists, philosophers and theologians have been forced to return to an ancient question:
What makes a human being truly human?
Or, more specifically, what makes you you?
That is, if the seemingly inescapable day comes when a person is created using the same techniques that gave us Dolly, how closely will the clone actually duplicate the human essence of its parent?
For scientists, it’s a question of nature and nurture, genetics and environment. For theologians, it’s a matter of soul.
But whatever their approach, both disciplines seem to agree that the ability to go into a laboratory and replicate a person’s laugh, the shape of their nose or the whorl of their fingerprint is not the same as duplicating that mysterious spark that makes each of us an individual, whole and unique.
Unlocking the nature of consciousness, soul, personality, spirit–the “ghost in the machine,” as English philosopher Gilbert Ryle called it–is still as elusive as ever, perhaps more so. But most experts agree that a clone, far from being a spiritual or psychic double of its parent, would be its own person.
A clone of Saddam Hussein would not necessarily covet Kuwait, for instance, even though the latest research on complex human behavior suggests a statistical likelihood that the clone would share Hussein’s palette of personality traits–such as risk-taking or leadership.
“What seems to worry people about cloning isn’t the transfer of genetic material, it’s the transfer of consciousness,” said Dean Hamer, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. “That won’t happen, and to prove it, all you have to do is talk to identical twins, who share 100 percent of their DNA but each have their own identities.”
“I would say that a cloned human would be as much a child of God as a non-cloned human,” said professor Martin Marty of the University of Chicago Divinity School, a Lutheran minister and writer. “There is a ghost in the machine. There’s something distinctive about human beings, but we’re hard-pressed to get at it.”
While medieval church fathers built elaborate descriptions of what the soul is and how it works, most mainstream theologians in recent centuries have concentrated on other issues.
Scientists, meanwhile, are only too happy to refer questions about consciousness and soul back to philosophers.
Yet even as the core of human nature remains shrouded, researchers have been chipping away at characteristics previously written off as mysteries of the mind. Geneticists now say that many complex psychological qualities once thought of as intangible can in fact be pinned to genes.
Decades’ worth of behavioral studies on identical twins separated at birth, for example, show that broad personality traits and emotions are to some degree inherited and often express themselves regardless of the children’s different home environments.
“From what we know, about 50 percent of a clone’s psychological traits would probably be influenced by its genetic makeup,” said Thomas Bouchard Jr., a University of Minnesota psychologist and one of the world’s leading experts on twin behavior. “Fearlessness and daring is heritable. So is shyness and impulsiveness.”
So–for that matter–are some portion of IQ, extroversion, phobias, many psychopathologies and, to a lesser degree, sexual orientation among men, researchers say. Indeed, geneticists last year announced a molecular basis for happiness–possibly associated with genes that code for processing dopamine, the brain’s pleasure chemical.
Some scientists caution that twin studies may overemphasize DNA’s contribution to behavior. And even Bouchard warns against reading too much into genetic correlations with personality when it comes to cloning. The importance of the interplay between genes and environmental feedback–which can either enhance or suppress DNA-coded behavior–is immense, he said.
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Case in point: The clone of an ruthless leader could end up channeling his or her risk-taking genes into a socially acceptable outlet such as being a heroic police officer. It all depends on upbringing.
Still, identical twins, nature’s experiment in cloning, are eerily alike in many ways.
“My sister and I both draw, we’re both emotional and our handwriting’s alike,” said Gilia Angell, a web site designer in Seattle who has created an Internet page for identical twins. “We even share the habit of scratching our heads the same way.”
But does that mean that they–or a clone-to-be–share some measure of consciousness?
“Speaking as an identical twin, I have never considered myself as having the same mind or even the same mind-set as my brother,” said Louis Keith, a twin-birth specialist at Northwestern University Medical Center. “It’s nonsensical to think clones would be otherwise.”
If anything, clones would be even more dissimilar than identical twins.
First, there is the obvious hurdle of re-creating for the clone the exact social environment in which the parent grew up. As pundits point out, to groom another Adolf Hitler, social engineers would need to subject the clone to artistic failure, expose him to the horrors of trench warfare and have him mature in an environment uncannily like the chaos and decadence of post-World War I Germany.
Other obstacles also stymie the creation of a perfect psychic double.
The clone would probably not occupy the same womb that the parent did–a crucial difference given the importance of prenatal environments. The clone’s DNA would come from old, adult cells that may have been subject to random mutations, thus possibly affecting development. And, using the same technology that was used on Dolly, the clone would not be an exact duplicate because it would carry a tiny fraction of cellular DNA from the woman who would supply the egg.
“The problem is, we sanctify DNA,” said Henry Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford University. “People seem to want to be eager to view their genome as their essence, instead of just molecules that pass on certain traits. In our secular culture, it’s almost taken the place of soul. That’s way overblown.”
The analogy to religion is not an idle one, sociologists say. Modern geneticists are trying to answer the same question that ancient shamans and philosophers were at the dawn of history: Who are we?
Along with “Where did we come from?” and “Where do we go after we die?” the question of human identity is thought to be one of the essential queries that led to the rise of organized religion.
And almost universally, the answers have included some idea of soul or spirit, an inner life that transcends the flesh. Just how those notions of soul fit or clash with a cloned person depends on the religion, but none is unaffected.
In Eastern religions, from Hinduism to Buddhism, the human soul moves from life to life, body to body. Ultimately the soul is the only true reality, while body and matter are illusion, which makes the advent of cloning more of a social than a spiritual concern.
“As a Hindu, it wouldn’t make any difference” to the soul, said Dr. Prakash Desai, a practicing psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “All souls are identical. The differences (between individual humans) are in names and forms.
“As the sacred texts say, all the ornaments you make out of gold are still gold.”
The Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, meanwhile, has a more integrated image of soul as the animating force of an individual’s life, inseparable from the body until death.
From early Jewish images of soul as breath or blood, theologians built upon the idea, defining and refining. Perhaps the most influential examination of the soul from a Christian perspective came in the 13th Century from Thomas Aquinas, who developed church teachings through the rigor of Aristotelian philosophy.
Aquinas wrote that while parents create the body of a child, God creates the soul, infusing it into the new body upon conception. And though it is one with the body throughout life, the soul lives on after death. Those ideas live on, essentially unchanged, in the Roman Catholic catechism today.
That explicit understanding of soul is more difficult with cloning.
Without procreation, how do God and soul enter the process? Is the dignity of the person, a central concern in current church teachings, damaged, if not by the process itself, then by the intentions behind cloning?
Laurence O’Connell, president of the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith and Ethics, points out the moral dangers to both the clone and the cloned, in even the most high-minded scenarios of cloning. If parents opted to clone a dying child, for instance, would the clone always be secondary to the original, unable to escape the condition that he was created as a stand-in?
“And what does that say about the child who is dying?” O’Connell asks. “Is that child irreplaceable or not?”
Langdon Gilkey, a Protestant theologian at Georgetown University, disputes the vocabulary of “soul” altogether, seeing God’s contribution to an individual not as a distinct gift of supernatural spirit, but in the workings of genetics and environment.
Still, he said, there is an “experience of an inward and an outward” that science cannot erase. Unlike many thinkers who have taken up the issue in the last week, Gilkey worries that a clone would be deprived of the “inwardness” that grows out of organic creation and experience.
“I think this would not be a full human being,” he said. “It would be a sort of fleshy robot.
“I don’t know that, but I’m worried. I have an awful feeling that this human being will lack something. We’re creating something that looks like a human, but is there a person in there?”
Professor Nancey Murphy of the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., also rejects a “dualistic” view of humanity that separates body and soul, a concept that she said has lost ground among liberal Christians as science has begun to discover the workings of the brain.
But Murphy said her “monist-physicalist” understanding of humanity–a person has a single, physical nature, from which all its qualities grow–gives her no qualms about the nature of a clone.
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“It’ll just be a plain, old human being,” she said, “like any ordinary person.”