An entire society of clones

Basically the story takes place in a world that was devastated by an apocalyptic virus, to the point that everyone alive in the “present” is a clone of the same woman (maybe because she was immune, but I don’t know). Essentially, as a reaction, society is extremely individualistic and cosmetics, up to and including cosmetic surgery, is considered a human right (obesity also isn’t stigmatized, for pretty much the same reason), but how far is it realistically possible for that to go? Would reproduction be limited to making more clones? Or would surgical modifications to some clones sex organs be a reasonable possibility?

Edited by ecss on Aug 23rd 2022 at 11:31:53 AM

The only reproduction would be through making more clones, because sexual reproduction would produce heavily inbred offspring who would be unlikely to live very long.

While it is technically possible that breeding the End-Hapsburg level inbred children together strategically could reduce the inbredness of the population, not only would that require a lot of statistical and scientific work to figure out who exactly should breed with who, it would also lead to a massive problem due to the founder effect, except amplified greatly. Any genetic orders carried by the single founder, whether or not they were expressed in the original founder or carried enough to cause the disorder would become extremely common within just a few generations.

The only hope for sexual reproduction would be heavy gene editing, which doesn't seem like much of a possibility, because the scenario seems to assume no other human DNA is out there. (otherwise after the plague died out because there were no more hosts a wide genetic diversity of clones would have been established through preserved DNA.)

If all clones are clones of a single women, then men are extinct and forever will be. The Y-genome is gone entirely.

You could plausibly harvest the marrow of the dead for DNA samples. The tissues wouldn't be viable but you could work backwards to figure out what valid human DNA looked like and then try to synthesize it from scratch. I know we've gotten DNA samples from mummies and used them to make estimations on how they looked in life.

That would, however, potentially move the world away from being populated entirely by clones of one person.

Well, theoretically, it is possible to make fertilization happen in a species with one type of chromosome. It's just not worth it because clonal reproduction is much better when you have extremely low genetic diversity.

There's a few species of lizard which are entirely female, but they don't reproduce sexually, they reproduce clonally, because sexual reproduction would lead to inbreeding.

(Mind, this new population with literally zero genetic diversity would be incredibly vulnerable to any disease that showed up that could infect them)

Edited by Florien on Aug 24th 2022 at 3:19:11 AM

Well yes but I thought we established that having only clones of a single person would doom society to copy degradation and inbreeding. Even if that problem is solved you've got tens of thousands of identical immune systems just waiting for some virus to crack it.

Not quite identical, epigenetics could, to a degree, alter or strengthen the immune system. (or weaken it)

It obviously wouldn't nearly be as good as actual genetic diversity on top of that, but it would be a very slight help.

Incidentally, the problem with clone degradation is almost entirely due to telomeres not recovering their original size when an organism is cloned. If genetic engineering could be better figured out, it would theoretically be possible to fix telomere degradation in clones. After all, parthenogenic species seem to have solved it evolutionarily.

The thing is, the original question asked after making a viable society of identical clones, I believe; my thinking, then, is that moving into systems with greater genetic diversity moves away from that goal.

Just a thought, but does it really matter if the clones can or cannot reproduce so long as they can keep cloning themselves?

because when you make clones of clones, you rapidly run into clone degradation issues. And it's going to be really hard to keep an original copy forever with no mistakes.

But generally speaking, with sufficiently advanced genetic engineering you could keep periodically fixing the genome to keep cloning as long as possible. I think it's in part a matter of how long your story is intended to run. A couple of centuries is easily doable, i think. if it's thousands or tens of thousands of years, you'd need strong measures to avoid degradation and other issues.

This reminds me that I might need to read The Bobiverse

Edited by MajorTom on Aug 25th 2022 at 2:49:44 AM

Unless the story has super advanced Sci-Fi tech that's basically magic

Let's back up a bit. Could we still achieve the concept using a clonal species or robots with human minds?

I got a solution.

Immortal Jellyfish serving as the brains, in robotic exoskeletons with a fish-tank as cranium and completely customize-friendly with the exception of this spherical fish-tank.

They go old, reverts into infancy, then grows up again, and goes back to infancy for all of eternity, while maintaining the intelligence of the human brain.

(Except they need to be re-educated EVERY SINGLE CYCLE once they are done with the embryonic stage and starts growing up again as a trade-off for the immortality...)

Immortal Jellyfish are anything but. While it's technically possible for them to revert to a pre-maturity state, they only do so if severely injured or under very specific conditions. While sometimes they will revert when old, those that don't get eaten die of disease, or sometimes, indeed, old age.

The process hasn't been observed in the jellyfish's natural habitat either, so it's questionable if the scenarios where it does revert to a polyp even come up particularly often in nature. They presumably do, otherwise it wouldn't be able to, but it's unclear how common the process is.

Also the jellyfish, (under lab conditions, so better than the wild) seem to have an upper lifespan bound before re-polyping of about a couple months, so it's questionable if it would be possible to learn anything in that time span.

Robots are certainly an option, if you have just the one brain scan and the technology to run it. Degradation wouldn't be a massive problem either, because copying copies would probably just alter the mind, rather than making it non-functional. (Though obviously this isn't known for sure, us not having technology for it.)

I do think clonal species are certainly a possibility. Certain whiptails seem to get along just fine, and theoretically they wouldn't be constrained by size, similar processes could reasonably be scaled up to a human-sized thing.

Is this a given? I thought it was common for wild organisms to be shorter-lived in captivity.

If this is a sci-fi, bending reality's rules by applying familiar concepts in fantastic ways is perfectly fine.

...

That said, I don't imagine all of the clones being fine with doing the "janitor-work" so to speak, since even if they are the made from the same template, they will all be their own separate individual with completely different minds and identities to one another, since you can't clone or copy a human soul.

Allows for a rich variety of appearances in them as well, since they make their own choices to give themselves further identity from the masses.

It depends on the organism, of course, touchier organisms can be hard to care for, and jellyfish are often touchy, but most life does better in captivity once its needs are known, and the needs of jellyfish are fairly well known.

(Especially in Monterey Bay and some parts of Japan, where there's dedicated and extremely specialized jellyfish husbandry programs. Jellyfish there often live longer. Not that that's an enormous difference on human scales, even the longest-lived jellyfish rarely last more than a couple of years.)

The main things that do poorly in captivity are certain kinds of shark and some kinds of extremely migratory animals.

Edited by Florien on Aug 26th 2022 at 7:15:52 AM