Jesse Bering

A close friend of mine from Florida has a talking parrot that I’ve never felt very comfortable around. True, I’m not much of a bird person—I prefer my pets’ pelages to be conducive to cuddling; feathers and scales just leave me feeling cold. However, even those without such biases would likely find this particular bird unsettling. It’s a man-hating, ill-tempered, unkempt old creature on the wrong side of forty, known to draw blood from the petting hands it entices through its deceptive cooing. And yet the parrot “speaks” (loquaciously, I might add) with the sweet, crackly voice of a little old lady.

It’s not so much the striking disconnect between the bird’s irritable temperament and the gentle tenor of its voice that makes me uneasy. Rather, it’s the fact that the voice is the voice of my friend’s long-dead, wheelchair bound mother, a sweet-natured woman from whom my friend inherited the bird about twenty years ago.

My friend claims that she finds it comforting to hear her mother’s voice everyday—singing, humming, chuckling, and blurting out the odd quip. Now, she’s a bright, rational person, but secretly I think my friend, at some level, has tangled up her mother’s identity with this peculiar bird. For example, she confided in me once that if the bird were to die, it would feel as if she’s losing a bit of her mother again too.

Although it’s not entirely clear why most people would find a parrot speaking in the voice of the dead so disconcerting, I suspect this aversive reaction is similar to the psychological confusion we tend to experience when pondering the subject of reproductive cloning. With reproductive cloning, we are similarly confronted with an organism whose personal identity is unclearly differentiated in our minds from a duplicate organism. Just like with talking birds that seem to channel the dead, we mentally stumble over the whereabouts of a person’s real “essence” in our thinking about clones.

Of course, for as long as there has been such a thing as reproductive sex in the animal kingdom (a few billion years), nature has had its own unique brand of cloning in the form of homozygous twins. Yet identical twins—unlike clones such as Dolly the sheep that are created through biotechnology —do not seem to trigger the same onslaught of heated debates regarding personhood. Those who read my earlier article in Scientific American Mind about our species' penchant for belief in the afterlife already know how I feel about the existence of souls—they’re a cognitive illusion. But for researchers who are interested in people’s attitudes toward such a hot-button ethical issue as cloning, it’s the way such beliefs influence our emotions, decisions, thoughts and attitudes about the issue that are of interest, not whether the belief itself is true or false.

You might expect religious affiliation to play a strong role in people’s attitudes towards cloning. But it isn’t that straightforward. For example, in a 2007 report published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, University of Surrey psychologist Richard Shepherd and his colleagues found that, “religious affiliation did not emerge from the various analyses as playing a major role” in focus groups’ weighing the pros and cons of cloning. And yet:

Invocations of the status of the embryo and the sanctity of human life functioned to exempt speakers from further more complex discussions of the permissibility of cloning technologies and other embryological research.

That is to say, although participants in these (British) focus groups seldom mentioned God or souls or even religion in passing, the subject of what it means to be an individual human being in essence crept up liberally—and authoritatively—in their spontaneous conversations.

Although conscious, moralistic concerns about “personhood” seem to be at the heart of many people’s rejection of cloning research, these concerns may be motivated by unconscious, unshakeable ideas about unseen personal essences—otherwise known as souls. I don’t know about you, but as narcissistic as I may be, the thought of bottle-feeding and toilet training my own genetic doppelganger is just creepy. Yet I also couldn’t explain to you exactly why it’s so creepy. I find this aversion of mine puzzling, since I know, rationally, this child wouldn’t really be “me” and, furthermore, I don’t believe in anything as crackpot as souls and spiritual essences. It’s the same type of subtle confusion I’d feel if anything bad were to befall my friend’s mom—er, talking parrot. (For a wonderful and accessible book on the subject of “commonsense dualism,” see Yale psychologist Paul Bloom’s Descartes’ Baby).

Oddly enough, though, I’d clone my beloved dead dog, Kit, in a heartbeat if it could be done safely and I had the money to burn, just as one wealthy Boca Raton couple recently did for their dog, Sir Lancelot (cleverly calling the new version “Sir Lancelot Encore”). Personally, I don’t see anything unethical about or wrong with cloning dead pets, since I know it’s just the animal’s artificial identical twin. Yet I also know that no matter how convincingly I expressed to you my scientific understanding that even identical twins have different environmental experiences starting from their different positioning in their mother’s womb, and the fact that this hypothetical canine clone was its own unique organism, my emotions would still fail to wrap around these empirical facts and I would indeed feel intuitively as though the puppy were Kit reborn. If my attachment to my dog is anything to go by, it’s easy to understand why so many of the participants in Shepherd and his coauthors’ study expressed concern over cloning technology falling into the hands of dubious biotech firms willing to exploit grieving parents.