ARMAGEDDON?

It's hard to believe the world isn't coming to an end, not if you read the news these days. Tanks are rolling into Bethlehem, providing some iconoclast a wonderfully ironic visual counterpoint to a classic Christmas carol next holiday season. It looks like weapons of mass destruction will rain from Baghdad to Teheran and everywhere in between.

And I'm not even compelled to write about that. No, it turns out that, not only are we hurtling toward insane destruction for religious purposes only, we're adding to the mix by cloning ourselves. It was announced today that the first human female is pregnant with a human clone.

So many scientific advances made in the previous century made sense… organ transplants, vaccines, even the human genome project in and of itself. But there is no valid purpose to cloning human beings. Nobody needs an exact duplicate of himself. There are too many human infants on the planet who aren't properly cared for to begin with without adding artificially created ones into the mix.

But more to the point, the whole reason evolution works is that each generation of births is an improvement on previous generations. If we begin to clone ourselves, we stop dead in the genetic pool, evolutionarily speaking.

Then again, if we're going to be incinerating the planet in the name of minuscule dfferences in the perception of the deity, then what the heck.