Would that advent of human cloning mean the end of "man"?

Somebody’s got to open that jar of pickles.

The fun in making babies would go away.

I think if the cloning thing worked out, it wouldn’t be the end of man, per se. It would just mean twice as many men.

But would it, pixel? I have a feeling babies will continue to be made “the old-fashioned way” for as long as humans exist and have the anatomy that they do.

edit: oooh, you’re saying after men ceased to exist? i get it…
no, but, because of the fun of baby-making (and a lot of other reasons, like religious fundamentalists who won’t “believe” in cloning), i don’t think men (or sex) will ever cease to exist.

And Bluefreedom, what? Why would there be more men? I don’t get it…

It was a joke and not a very good one, I guess. The end of man, cloning, making a replica of each one and hence ‘twice as many men’.

There’s nothing like bombing out on Fluther in the middle of the afternoon. :o(

If the only method used to create new children was cloning, there would be a huge lack of genetic diversity in the population, which would be a major problem. If everyone has almost identical genes, the chances that we’d all be wiped out by a virus would be very high.

And I may be missing something, by why would it just be women making clones of themselves? Wouldn’t men do so as well?

Most people aren’t worth cloning.

Clones aren’t copies of the original person any more than twins are copies of one another.

@kerigrace ain’t that the truth!

@Hobbes With a population of 6.8 billion (http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop), genetic diversity would not be an issue for millennia, if ever (unless you’re talking about cloning just a select few).

@Hobbes. You only need women, because the current system still requires a woman to carry the fetus to term. Since men do not have a uterus, women could simply decide to propagate only themselves, since they would be doing all of the “work”. Men, on the other hand, would need a woman to carry their “clones”.

Ahh. That makes sense now, shilolo. And syz – I take your point.

I’d think we (women) would still want men around. We’d just go about cloning all the best men.

These men:

http://www.allowe.com/Humor/femalePorn.htm

@syz. At the risk of sounding whipped, or metro, I’ve done all of those, save the craft fair… Time to go hide in a dark closet…

Could I convince you to send me a photo of yourself vacuuming shirtless?

http://www.chroniclebooks.com/images/items/0811862/081186233X/081186233X_large.jpg

I hope you have a strong stomach.

Supposedly, the Y chromosome is doomed anyway. Sometime in the next few millennia, if what I’d read is correct.

@Shilolo; I’d take your clone anyday, metroman.

(swooning over “save” as foist on me ^^.)

Gail, just take his twin. It would be much easier.

The twin doesn’t do windows, I have heard.

Some hotshot doctor once tried to tell me that if we manipulated the DNA of our offspring too much, there would inevitably be effects we didn’t anticipate.

It would be nice! But we’d still need them for the crap jobs.

deaddolly – I know you were joking, but that remark is a good display of a rather nasty turn that some sects of feminism have taken. It seems that some women who profess to be feminists attempt to demonstrate the fact that women are the equals of men, not by building themselves up, but by insulting and belittling males. They seem, in short, to have done a one-eighty and started making sexist remarks about men. Any suggestion that one sex should be given all the shit jobs is very sexist, no matter what gender it applies to. Sorry for being humorless, but that whole attitude is something that annoys me greatly, not only because I’m male, but because it impedes the cause of feminism and gives it a bad name.

Actually I was only 1/2 joking. It’s ok to belittle and degrade women?

I’m not gay; not a feminist, but it wouldn’t bother me one bit if men became extinct.

Did I say that it was? What I stated was that women belittling and degrading men is just as bad as men belittling and degrading women. Comments such as “it wouldn’t bother me one bit if men became extinct” fall into that category.

Read Robert A.Heinlein’s book “Friday”. He deals with the issue most humanely from the perspective of an “artificial person”. His title character is a young woman who was bioengineered to be physically and mental superior to “normal” humans but was subject to social and legal discrimination as a “non-human”. A book well worth reading.