Friday Fluff – March 18th, 2011

Friday Fluff – March 18th, 2011

FF3

1) First, a post from the past: Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters.

2) Weird search query of the week: “cheap pretty tutus.”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Think Twins”:

An interesting point. No one can create another Hitler via cloning, nor a Charlemagne or even Mozart should their DNA be available in some way. The problems are many and are well illustrated with a car analogy… GM tries to produce exacting replicas of individual models thousands of times and they do this every year. Despite their efforts, quality varies, performance varies, endurance varies. No two vehicles of the same model are identical. Like a car has a driver, a human has a brain. Despite their similarities, identical twins are not identical in all ways.

They say that everyone has a twin somewhere. My friends met someone that looks nearly exactly like me. Yet other people have my same name. None of those people are me or even like me in meaningful ways. Cloning a human will get you a human which looks like another – nothing more. There is nothing special in that… until genetic ID …

Razib Khan