good talk, he brought to light many issues that people have been dismissing too easily.

but i feel like he incorrectly addressed the issue of aged DNA, specifically not referring to telomer length...

Good response -- I don't know what the hell you are talking about, but I'm sure there ARE possible disastrous side effects of cloning.

My critique -- this is basically a "negative Nancy" argument -- it attempts to limit the possibilities of disaster by reducing the applications to triviality. So it is very unimaginative and very non-speculative, reducing a scientific breakthrough to "aiding old hags getting knocked up". It may very well be true that cloning applications are trivial -- in which case, there is as little reason to argue for it as to ban it. It basically obviates the need FOR an argument by trivializing the subject.

Counterargument: Something COULD go wrong -- it is utterly impossible to argue otherwise, since you can only keep on asserting that cloning has not gone wrong, as far as you know. And since the reasons FOR cloning are so trivial, then you would agree that there is no reason to open up the possibility of disaster simply so old hags can get knocked up. Therefore, cloning should be banned.

its a debate. It means nothing. Although I agreed with most of his points, debates are crappy. boo! I remember being in a debate in high school. I won that debate. It was on a subject i totally disagreed with.