The thing is, what if there's an even better horse out there? Once you get on the cloning bandwagon, don't you also lock yourself out of looking/evolving an even better horse?
>“It was the same,” he recalls. “Same movements, same head.... I couldn’t believe it.”
My grandpa said the same thing, first time he saw me.
For a brief moment I thought this would be about something like robotic polo ponies, and considered the idea that four-legged high agility, high endurance robots had advanced significantly without me noticing.
And i thought it was about those polo shirts and replicas of the horse logo on the “fake” t-shirts.
Me too, I guess I don’t think of “replica” and “clone” as synonymous in the context of animals.
Seems like a carefully chosen term, maybe clone being too controversial.
I think replicant would be a fun term though. :)
Though we are not yet competitive in the Argentinian Polo clone wars, we are making significant progress - https://www.satyress.com/
A concerning amount of that product page is spent explaining how it has to slow down to pass through doorways, its inability to turn around in hallways, and its weak points you can use to disable one with a knife or gunshot. I feel like I'm reading a tutorial for how to defeat a tricky enemy in a video game.
that's a forward thinking robotics company right there. putting in weakspots for when the centaur robot revolution begins. so we have a chance.
This has to be some kind of kink thing. Not judging, just how it looks from first appearances.
That'd be alot more ethical than the current horse racing industry if it were the case.
Humans riding racing robots id watch, but not horse racing.
Surprised that the legal drama part of this wasn't discussed, it's how I first heard about this
Perhaps Polo will end up like competitive sailing with one-design classes based on the clone of horse. "Measurement" would be a blood test for drugs and dna.
cloned horses are good at competitive sailing also?!?
Another Argentina/cloning-connected story is that President Javier Milei cloned his dog Conan at least four times: https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-04-26/the-myst...
The stories make me wonder if Argentina is a cloning hotspot, though I may be reading too much into two stories.
That is where many of the nazi war doctors who escaped prosecution ended up…
Not as many as the ones that the US snatched in operation paperclip
Exactly, the dog was cloned in the US
Seems Brazil lost its early lead after cloning Hitler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_(film)
Humans can likely be cloned too.
Imagine 10,000 Albert Einsteins and John von Neumanns working together with modern AI on medical, scientific, and societal issues.
Though there could be an Evil Einstein due to upbringing or something.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
(quote by Stephen Jay Gould)
Don't twin studies mostly show this wouldn't be the case?
Yes, and no.
Twin studies are very politicized, waved around as an 'everyone is equal' flag, and therefore are often quite exaggerated.
People have difficulties differentiating between "some 'races' might on average show poorer test results" from "this person in front of me is from that 'race'" and "I'll therefore make an assumption predicated upon averages". This is true with all such things. EG, "women love shoes" vs "this person in front of me is a woman, therefore she MUST love shoes".
The first part of that statement is not sexist "women love shoes", the second part is "this person in front of me is a woman, therefore she MUST love shoes", but again the average person has immense difficulty with that assessment, and so the first statement is preemptively labeled sexist as a societal cure-method.
So anything which could be waved about to say "everyone is precisely the same, genetics don't matter" is used. Another such example of this, is how much 'everyone can be world class with 10000 hours of practice" nonsense which kept popping up about a decade ago. A mere utterance by one person, and everyone immediately accepted this concept. Why?
It lends towards equality.
Just as the concept of "there's nothing special or unique about any human being, it's all just how someone is raised" does too. So twin studies are absolutely essential in this context, and any aspect of such which fits this mantra is exaggerated, and any which does not ignored.
The truth, of course, is a mixture of things.
Genetics do matter. And yes, environment does matter too. With the US, and its 'left right' politics, it's basically 'this or that', never 'this and that'. If something becomes political, such as race politics, then you have only two views. Black and white, 0 or 1, no grey, nothing in-between.
Yet the truth is, it's both.
The 'platform' if you will, is indeed important. Genetics is important. Without that underlying framework, you're not going to get a genius.
Yet there are also additionals, such as yes -- were you raised in an environment capable of fostering that talent? An example being, if you're not provided the proper nutrition when growing up, your brain, your body won't be what it could be. The same is true in other aspects of your rearing. And of course, external factors can cause different genes to be expressed.
For example:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/23443-pinguec...
Pinguecula is often the result of the sun striking the side of your nose, and then it reflecting into your eyes. This is especially true if you're working outside, and your nose becomes sweaty, the water and oils of the skin causing a stronger reflection.
This bump is thought to reduce the sunlight from that angle, and it tends to only grow on people which spent a lot of time outdoors. It's the result of latent genes being expressed.
Genes are sometimes only expressed due to rare circumstances.
So certainly with twins, this is a possibility, with change ended up both physically and intellectually. Potential not seen, without the conditions to bring it about.
Twin studies don't always look at this. Most studies say something such as 'raised in similar conditions, in towns with similar crime rates, and equal access to food, etc, etc'.
Yet does that cover anything?
Each child may have gone to school with an entirely different range of exposure to other humans. For example, bullying, or even just one being exposed to more or less intelligent children as their peer group. And all food is not equal, a local field can have more important trace elements in it, compared to one even 10km away. A diet supplemented by local fare, can have an enormous difference in terms of nutrition.
I guess my exceptionally long winded point is, twin studies are wrought with a lack of real care, and bandied about due to US politics, and should not be taken seriously.
To take a step back from this, a parallel to twin studies, is ... well.. lineage.
You'll see many people in this thread talking about horse lineages. Well if lineage matters, twins are a sub-set of that. So all of the very extensive data around rearing horses, cattle, dogs, and all other animals and lineage, must be discounted as nonsense, if one is to discount twin theory.
What's the difference between humans and say.. horses here?
Rearing.
As I mentioned with twin studies, the platform is absolutely required to excel. Yet the truth is both, and rearing is important.
Yet when you raise horses, horses which could be worth millions, you raise them in a very controlled environment! The platform is there, the genetics are there, but the conditions which brought it out in the 'twin/clone', which resulted in the result last time, are far more identical in this case.
You have people raising these horses with training on a daily basis. Specifically enriched feed, great care to their health, and so on. The raising of such horses is far, far more controlled than any human typically receives.
So with horses, you have the platform, but also very rigid environmental conditions too.
ur replying to an anti-humanist
I am not sure if the Einsteins you clone would do what you want. Maybe they will want to be influencers on short video platforms.
I would watch him carefully if he grew a goatee or something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(Star_Trek:_The...
However unlikely it may be, when I see a wealthy celebrity with a doppleganger child the thought crosses my mind that they may have had themselves cloned.
The resemblance between young Donald Trump and his son Barron is uncanny, for example.
You are such an optimist. We are more likely to get clones of athletes, and clones of billionaires for the organ donation options.
I doubt people like Jonas Salk would accept being cloned if they could help it
Nope, that's what relativistic slugs are for
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Given the way the world is now, I will not be surprised if full human cloning and replica people is a thing at some point in my lifetime, just like horses.
> At the slightest touch of the reins, he felt a familiarity that shook him...
Ah... Some good, old, pre-AI journalism slop.
Oh the countless times a universities press release has been turned into four pages describing the smell of coffee some scientist inhales on their way through campus...
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I hope we can get past the bad E word and we consider a better future for humanity. A future with millions of clones of people like Einstein, Alexander Fleming, Louis Pasteur, etc. The technology seems imminent. It's like we already have the winning DNA lottery tickets.
Yes, but developing a better horse has a low likelihood of success and a relatively long time horizon. There are some arms race dynamics here in that as long as no one else is trying to develop a better horse, you probably are better off just not trying to either.
> what if there's an even better horse out there
Doesn't matter, such things threaten the horse investor lock in economics.
Many years past, an early bit of software from my student days was a side project making an easy to use database system for a horse stud farm, high status stallions being put to mares with the feed, vet visits, results, etc. all logged.
Horse racing is pretty much all about pedigree - without the lineage horses are considered valueless by the industry - super fast back country waler crosses might be acceptable for a four mile charge across open ground onto machine gun nests .. but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate that horse for racing.
I imagine Polo to be much the same, in the rich set. Probably more open and accepting out on the steppes knocking about the heads of the vanquished.
> but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate
sounds like an opportunity. as horse racing has a monetary reward associated with success one imagines a moneyball sort of play that you can compound by betting on your horse which the oddsmakers are going to handicap because it "doesn't have the pedigree" (at least the first few go arounds)
There is a wee bit of money to be made winning a race, sure.
Here's a question though (can vary by country and racing industry), how do the winnings from racing (as a distribution) compare to the earnings from pedigree breeding, stud fees, sperm straw sales, etc.?
I agree there's room for disruption, just as there is from (say) the iron grip of the US Home Owners Associations and other cartels, but expect a lot of regulatory push back from the insiders.
The, ah, American Quarter Horse Association won't let any old nag run if they can help it.
You'd expect so and it's bound to have been done, it's still one of those domains where the establishment (owners, trainers, breeders, jockeys, track associations, etc) is weighted against outsiders.
Money would count, but I dare say it'd need a bit of crafty social engineering running in parallel to crack in.
Caveat: I'm not a horse racing / polo insider - I did some contract work years back and rubbed shoulders with a bunch of millionaire horsey types.
Pedigree is often a scam.
I know a peer of the realm who made pretty much his entire fortune on forged horses - he was breeding to make fast horses, but the pedigree was a load of, well, horseshit. All started because he’d bought a stallion who shot blanks.
Now it’s all about eight generations deep so he’s safe at this point, as they’re their own pedigree now.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on cows. There's a whole black market genomics industry going on in the uk right now, and probably elsewhere, too.
I can only agree. Hard.
It's less about the horse, the speed, the actual genetics - it's all about the process, the appearance, the gate-keeping.
Country Clubs for horses (and cows, etc)
At some point moving up the luxury scale the price is less about product and more about buyer psychology.
I can sell a ripped t-shirt, but that same product coming from an upscale exclusive boutique owned by so-and-so’s wife is participation in a whole ecosystem with lots of signalling to other buyers in the same financial strata.
Looks very much like the only chance of that ever happening now is if someone established a separate league that only allows naturally conceived horses.
There’s commodities and then R&D. Ignoring every other moral consideration, this horse cloning has turned a biological asset into a (relative)commodity, and if people were looking for better horses they’d stick to the randomized mutation of regular breeding which has that built in as a feature.
This isn’t even the only instance of this technique. You can look at the Argentinian president Milei who hired a company to provide him with consistent advisors in the form of cloned dogs he talks with through a mystic[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_(Javier_Milei%27s_dog)