There is, may I suggest, much contrived anxiety about the possibility of human cloning. Cloning is simply one means whereby separate individuals with identical genetic make-up can come into being. Clones are part of nature in respect, for example, of plants that reproduce vegetatively (new strawberry plants are usually severed runners from the parent plant). Among animals, including humans, genetically identical individuals are known to exist as identical twins (although it must be emphasised that the mechanism whereby identical twinning occurs is quite different from that which operates in cloning).

The spectre being conjured up is that of 'unnaturally' identical people whose very existence would undermine the concept of personal individuality - a concept properly dear both to liberal religious believers and to most secular humanists.

The religious believer sees each of us as God's particular creation, each with a particular place in His Plan; the secular humanist sees people as two-sided; each of us is a unique individual while, equally, each of us is a quantum of common humanity.

Both views imply that inward looking sectional loyalties .... to tribe, to nation, to creed, to ethnic group, and so on .... are potentially totalitarian and dangerously divisive. On the one view, we are all God's individual children in His image; on the other view we are all fundamentally equal but different.

The fear that human cloning destroys individuality is ill-founded; emerging individuality is partly a matter of genetic endowment and partly a matter of life's circumstances - cultural background, upbringing, available opportunities and so on.

Rather than harbour exaggerated fears about human cloning, we should see what good and bad possibilities it offers and act accordingly.

A striking example of sheer silliness on this subject was published recently as a letter to one of the 'quality' editors. The correspondent wrote that clones are identical and he cited the well known rose variety known as PEACE. All plants of this variety are identical - originating as offshoots from a single parent plant. He went on to infer that all the clones of a particular human person would really be the same person and that 'they' should have, say, only one vote and one pension between them. (It occurs to me, ES, that female clones might, on this basis, all have the same husband - the mind boggles. As they used to say in the Royal Navy, never volunteer for anything!).

The letter to that famous newspaper contains not only the reductio ad absurdum of the false view that human heredity determines identity; the very analogy of the rose, itself, breaks down.

A friend and I could both cultivate PEACE - he in the south of England and I in Orkney. The two plants would soon be very different because of differences of soil, climate, incidence of pests and diseases and - quite possibly because his gardening skills are superior to mine. It might even happen that his plant is killed by a disease which does not occur in Orkney; then I would send him, in restrained triumph, a cutting of my poor but surviving specimen and he could grow it on to be a better plant than mine can ever be here.

What becomes of a new-formed living thing is partly laid down in its genes and partly caused by its circumstances and by its response to those circumstances. Cloned humans could be uncannily alike but they need not be; it is at least possible that good could come of it even if they were alike by reason of similar nurture on top of genetic equivalence.

It is possible to imagine a very talented person producing great work before reaching the age of, say, thirty-five. If cloning were achieved at a suitable moment then the new, genetically identical, individual would very soon get into the ways of the talented parent person and might do more good work - the chip carrying on from where the old block left off - and very easily, precisely because of genetic predisposition. What music might have come from cloning the twenty-five year old Schubert or the twenty-seven year old Mozart!

It has to be said that a clone of the forty-year old Hitler might have learned, especially easily, from the experience of his parent and so might have come to winning another anti-Nazi war.

One possibility that might arise from human cloning is a male-free world; Dolly and her parent are both female sheep. The attractions of such a world have long been canvassed by feminists; men, it is claimed, are aggressively posturing rapists and warmongers and a world free of them would be the better for their absence. The male sex, it might be admitted, has been necessary up to the present stage in human development but, like much else, has, perhaps, been rendered redundant by the march of progress. One can only say that the man-free world has at least one advantage; its arrival would make militant feminism wither on the vine.

An all-female world of cloning might, or might not, please the traditionalists. All the grousing anxieties about divorce, contraception and abortion would melt away - being no longer applicable and, likewise, there would be no need to proscribe male homosexuality. But all would not be lost; there would still be lesbian love to agonise over.

The worst, or best, of it might be that no men would mean, for the traditionalists, no priests and their God would drift inexorably into femininity.

Religion does not have a monopoly of fantasy ....

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