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It's really not. If nothing else, conditions in the uterus, especially in the first few months, are extremely crucial. Take 10 identical fertilized eggs and put

It's really not. If nothing else, conditions in the uterus, especially in the first few months, are extremely crucial. Take 10 identical fertilized eggs and put them in 10 different people and you'll get 10 different humans, not 10 clones as people generally assume. And this is not just genetics of the mother, differences in diet and lifestyle will also significantly (not to mention history) impact the development of the fetus, especially in the early months.

sho 2y ago
> Take 10 identical fertilized eggs and put them in 10 different people and you'll get 10 different humans Well, some would say if you took 10 identical fertilised eggs and put them in the same human in serial you'd get 10 different humans. Some would say there's no such thing as 10 identical fertilised eggs, or 10 identical anything. The question is how different? 10 identical eggs in 10 well-nourished, healthy people and the results should be pretty similar, no?
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  > Some would say there's no such thing as 10 identical fertilised eggs, or 10 identical anything. Sure, "identical" is a strong word for anything biological. > The question is how different? 10 identical eggs in 10 well-nourished, healthy people and the results should be pretty similar, no? My understanding is that they would be less similar than "identical" twins, more similar than regular siblings.
  - calf 2y ago
    But wouldn't "surrogate clones" as the category be closer to twins than siblings? They would be closer to twins than fraternal twins.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      Honestly I don't think it's very clear. The practicalities of cloning processes make it so that we are very far from exploring what's in principle possible. All of the cloned mammals so far have died pretty young even when the original organism lived a long and healthy life, so in that sense they are technically way more different than even siblings. Of course, this is almost certainly just a limitation of our currently imperfect cloning technology, so it's hard to judge what a perfected cloning tech would do. Of course, certain aspects of appearance are known to be almost exclusively genetically determined, such as eye, hair, and skin color. Some fine details are known from identical twin studies to not be fully determined, such as fingerprints (twins have slightly different fingerprints). For the majority of other fine details, it's actually pretty unclear.
- pvaldes 2y ago
  Lots of red flags here. To start, in the 99% of the times this question can be answered with: no. I bet that the man being promoted here as the best thing since the invention of Banjo, didn't discovered the effect of chemical gradients in Embryology. (I don't know everything, and I could be wrong. I'm open to discuss his published scientific articles in the field). That the same process that makes your arm will be repeated later to build each one of your fingers is known since many decades ago (count the number of articulations, is always car, car plus a cdr). See the video of U2 "Even better than the real thing" for a graphic representation of the idea. Yes, this is how it works basically. > Take 10 identical fertilized eggs and put them in 10 different people and you'll get 10 different humans You can bet it. This big claims always worry me. They either reveal a basic lack of understanding about biology, or are predatory and directed to select people that don't understand even the most basic concepts on Biology. An spermatozoa can be used just one or zero times. Period. There is not such thing as "10 identically fertilized eggs put in the same woman will get exactly the same human ten times", because is impossible to find 10 genetically identical spermatozoans and 10 genetically identical ovules to match them. Each time meiosis happens what you have is a similar but genetically different cell
ars 2y ago
The design of the uterus was also included in that 750MB. Which means this ability to usefully vary the final product is also included in the 750MB! If anything that makes it even more astonishing, not less.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Biological systems don't work this way. You need a fully living organism + DNA to produce a new organism. You can't "bootstrap" just from the DNA. DNA is not a blueprint: it is more like a recipe that assumes an intricate set of tools already exist. If you only had the DNA and not the "tools" (a living, healthy enough mother), you wouldn't get more than a few cells from it.
  - ars 2y ago
    That's not what I said. The "tools" were also created from DNA, i.e. the mother. Or are you saying that there's essentially undocumented-code that exists inside a living organisim and is transmitted mother to daughter, by virtue of being gestated, but is not in DNA?
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      I'm sort of saying that, yes. Some of this is actually very well known - at the cellular level, when a cell divides, the nuclear DNA doesn't uniquely determine every aspect of the new cells, certain organelles divide separately and by their own mechanisms. So, it's trivial to observe that you can't recreate a cell fully knowing just its DNA, you also need the mitochondrial DNA but also other bits. But there is even more than that. Imagine you had a program that explained exactly how to build a PC that can run this same program, starting from raw sand and ending up with a fully powered PC. So, if you boot a PC and give it access to a smart factory, this program will create a new smart factory from scratch that is a near perfect copy of the original smart factory. The question is: if you don't have a smart factory at all, you just found this program on printed paper, would you be able to use it to build a smart factory? Most likely, no, because the program can easily depend on certain details of the original smart factory that it was used to copy. Let's say, it could have instructions like "measure the length of original.robot_arm_7 and cut this piece of metal to the same length", or, "combine the liquid in original.vat3 with two parts "water" and 1 part liquid from original.vat7, and pour the result in copy.vat3". This is how life works: it uses DNA to build copies of itself, but DNA can't help you build the original base cell, that was arrived at by an entirely different process. Edit: for another simple example, consider that, if some ultra-advanced alien species found a population of living mammals, but they were all female, they would be fully able to create more females of the same species. But, it would be completely impossible for them to create a male of the original species, because there is no DNA whatsoever in a female mammal that explains how to build a testicle or a sperm cell. They could build artificial males, but they couldn't ever know if those males resemble the originals or not. So again, the DNA of an organism doesn't encode all the information necessary to create the species, that is transmitted through a more complex mechanism.
seydor 2y ago
A lossy compression

sho 2y ago

> Take 10 identical fertilized eggs and put them in 10 different people and you'll get 10 different humans Well, some would say if you took 10 identical fertilised eggs and put them in the same human in serial you'd get 10 different humans. Some would say there's no such thing as 10 identical fertilised eggs, or 10 identical anything. The question is how different? 10 identical eggs in 10 well-nourished, healthy people and the results should be pretty similar, no?

tsimionescu 2y ago
> Some would say there's no such thing as 10 identical fertilised eggs, or 10 identical anything. Sure, "identical" is a strong word for anything biological. > The question is how different? 10 identical eggs in 10 well-nourished, healthy people and the results should be pretty similar, no? My understanding is that they would be less similar than "identical" twins, more similar than regular siblings.
- calf 2y ago
  But wouldn't "surrogate clones" as the category be closer to twins than siblings? They would be closer to twins than fraternal twins.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Honestly I don't think it's very clear. The practicalities of cloning processes make it so that we are very far from exploring what's in principle possible. All of the cloned mammals so far have died pretty young even when the original organism lived a long and healthy life, so in that sense they are technically way more different than even siblings. Of course, this is almost certainly just a limitation of our currently imperfect cloning technology, so it's hard to judge what a perfected cloning tech would do. Of course, certain aspects of appearance are known to be almost exclusively genetically determined, such as eye, hair, and skin color. Some fine details are known from identical twin studies to not be fully determined, such as fingerprints (twins have slightly different fingerprints). For the majority of other fine details, it's actually pretty unclear.
pvaldes 2y ago
Lots of red flags here. To start, in the 99% of the times this question can be answered with: no. I bet that the man being promoted here as the best thing since the invention of Banjo, didn't discovered the effect of chemical gradients in Embryology. (I don't know everything, and I could be wrong. I'm open to discuss his published scientific articles in the field). That the same process that makes your arm will be repeated later to build each one of your fingers is known since many decades ago (count the number of articulations, is always car, car plus a cdr). See the video of U2 "Even better than the real thing" for a graphic representation of the idea. Yes, this is how it works basically. > Take 10 identical fertilized eggs and put them in 10 different people and you'll get 10 different humans You can bet it. This big claims always worry me. They either reveal a basic lack of understanding about biology, or are predatory and directed to select people that don't understand even the most basic concepts on Biology. An spermatozoa can be used just one or zero times. Period. There is not such thing as "10 identically fertilized eggs put in the same woman will get exactly the same human ten times", because is impossible to find 10 genetically identical spermatozoans and 10 genetically identical ovules to match them. Each time meiosis happens what you have is a similar but genetically different cell

ars 2y ago

The design of the uterus was also included in that 750MB. Which means this ability to usefully vary the final product is also included in the 750MB! If anything that makes it even more astonishing, not less.

tsimionescu 2y ago
Biological systems don't work this way. You need a fully living organism + DNA to produce a new organism. You can't "bootstrap" just from the DNA. DNA is not a blueprint: it is more like a recipe that assumes an intricate set of tools already exist. If you only had the DNA and not the "tools" (a living, healthy enough mother), you wouldn't get more than a few cells from it.
- ars 2y ago
  That's not what I said. The "tools" were also created from DNA, i.e. the mother. Or are you saying that there's essentially undocumented-code that exists inside a living organisim and is transmitted mother to daughter, by virtue of being gestated, but is not in DNA?
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    I'm sort of saying that, yes. Some of this is actually very well known - at the cellular level, when a cell divides, the nuclear DNA doesn't uniquely determine every aspect of the new cells, certain organelles divide separately and by their own mechanisms. So, it's trivial to observe that you can't recreate a cell fully knowing just its DNA, you also need the mitochondrial DNA but also other bits. But there is even more than that. Imagine you had a program that explained exactly how to build a PC that can run this same program, starting from raw sand and ending up with a fully powered PC. So, if you boot a PC and give it access to a smart factory, this program will create a new smart factory from scratch that is a near perfect copy of the original smart factory. The question is: if you don't have a smart factory at all, you just found this program on printed paper, would you be able to use it to build a smart factory? Most likely, no, because the program can easily depend on certain details of the original smart factory that it was used to copy. Let's say, it could have instructions like "measure the length of original.robot_arm_7 and cut this piece of metal to the same length", or, "combine the liquid in original.vat3 with two parts "water" and 1 part liquid from original.vat7, and pour the result in copy.vat3". This is how life works: it uses DNA to build copies of itself, but DNA can't help you build the original base cell, that was arrived at by an entirely different process. Edit: for another simple example, consider that, if some ultra-advanced alien species found a population of living mammals, but they were all female, they would be fully able to create more females of the same species. But, it would be completely impossible for them to create a male of the original species, because there is no DNA whatsoever in a female mammal that explains how to build a testicle or a sperm cell. They could build artificial males, but they couldn't ever know if those males resemble the originals or not. So again, the DNA of an organism doesn't encode all the information necessary to create the species, that is transmitted through a more complex mechanism.

seydor 2y ago

A lossy compression