CAN SOULS BE XEROXED?

By ROBERT WRIGHT

The world has had a week to conjure up nightmare scenarios, yet no one has articulated the most frightening peril posed by human cloning: rampant self-satisfaction. Just consider. If cloning becomes an option, what kind of people will use it? Exactly--people who think the world could use more of them; people so chipper that they have no qualms about bestowing their inner life on a dozen members of the next generation; people, in short, with high self-esteem. The rest of us will sit there racked with doubt, worried about inflicting our tortured psyches on the innocent unborn, while all around us shiny, happy people proliferate like rabbits. Or sheep, or whatever.

Of course, this assumes that psyches get copied along with genes. That seems to be the prevailing assumption. People nod politely to the obligatory reminder about the power of environment in shaping character. But many then proceed to talk excitedly about cloning as if it amounts to Xeroxing your soul.

What makes the belief in genetic identity so stubborn? In part a natural confusion over headlines. There are zillions of them about how genes shape behavior, but the underlying stories spring from two different sciences. The first, behavioral genetics, studies genetic differences among people. (Do you have the thrill-seeking gene? You do? Mind if I drive?) Behavioral genetics has demonstrated that genes matter. But does that mean that genes are destiny, that your clone is you?

Enter the second science, evolutionary psychology. It dwells less on genetic difference than on commonality. In this view, the world is already chock-full of virtual clones. My next-door neighbor--or the average male anywhere on the globe--is a 99.9%-accurate genetic copy of me. And paradoxically, many of the genes we share empower the environment to shape behavior and thus make us different from one another. Natural selection has preserved these "malleability genes" because they adroitly tailor character to circumstance.

Thus, though some men are more genetically prone to seek thrills than others, men in general take fewer risks if married with children than if unattached. Though some people may be genetically prone to high self-esteem, everyone's self-esteem depends heavily on social feedback. Genes even mold personality to our place in the family environment, according to Frank Sulloway, author of Born to Rebel, the much discussed book on birth order. Parents who clone their obedient oldest child may be dismayed to find that the resulting twin, now lower in the family hierarchy, grows up to be Che Guevara.

This malleability could, in a roundabout way, produce clones who are indeed soul mates. Your clone would, after all, look like you. And certain kinds of faces and physiques lead to certain kinds of experiences that exert certain effects on the mind. Early in this century, a fledgling effort at behavioral genetics divided people into such classes as mesomorphs--physically robust, psychologically assertive--and ectomorphs--skinny, nervous, shy. But even if these generalizations hold some water, it needn't mean that ectomorphs have genes for shyness. It may just mean that skinny people get pushed around on the junior-high playground and their personality adapts. (This is one problem with those identical-twins-reared-apart studies by behavioral geneticists: Do the twins' characters correlate because of "character genes" or sometimes just because appearance shapes experience which shapes character?)

People who assume that genes are us seem to think that if you reared your clone, you would experience a kind of mind meld--not quite a fusion of souls, maybe, but an uncanny empathy with your budding carbon copy. And certainly empathy would at times be intense. You might know exactly how nervous your frail, gawky clone felt before the high school prom or exactly how eager your attractive, athletic clone felt.

On the other hand, if you really tried, you could similarly empathize with people who weren't your clone. We've all felt an adolescent's nervousness, and we've all felt youthfully eager, because these feelings are part of the generic human mind, grounded in the genes that define our species. It's just that we don't effortlessly transmute this common experience into empathy except in special cases--with offspring or siblings or close friends. And presumably with clones.

But the cause of this clonal empathy wouldn't be that your inner life was exactly like your clone's (it wouldn't be). The catalyst, rather, would be seeing that familiar face--the one in your high school yearbook, except with a better haircut. It would remind you that you and your clone were essentially the same, driven by the same hopes and fears. You might even feel you shared the same soul. And in a sense, this would be true. Then again, in a sense, you share the same soul with everyone.