Word: clones
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...Though some people may be genetically prone to high self-esteem, everyone's self-esteem depends heavily on social feedback. Genes even mold personality to our place in the family environment, according to Frank Sulloway, author of Born to Rebel, the much discussed book on birth order. Parents who clone their obedient oldest child may be dismayed to find that the resulting twin, now lower in the family hierarchy, grows up to be Che Guevara...
This malleability could, in a roundabout way, produce clones who are indeed soul mates. Your clone would, after all, look like you. And certain kinds of faces and physiques lead to certain kinds of experiences that exert certain effects on the mind. Early in this century, a fledgling effort at behavioral genetics divided people into such classes as mesomorphs--physically robust, psychologically assertive--and ectomorphs--skinny, nervous, shy. But even if these generalizations hold some water, it needn't mean that ectomorphs have genes for shyness. It may just mean that skinny people get pushed around on the junior-high...
People who assume that genes are us seem to think that if you reared your clone, you would experience a kind of mind meld--not quite a fusion of souls, maybe, but an uncanny empathy with your budding carbon copy. And certainly empathy would at times be intense. You might know exactly how nervous your frail, gawky clone felt before the high school prom or exactly how eager your attractive, athletic clone felt...
...other hand, if you really tried, you could similarly empathize with people who weren't your clone. We've all felt an adolescent's nervousness, and we've all felt youthfully eager, because these feelings are part of the generic human mind, grounded in the genes that define our species. It's just that we don't effortlessly transmute this common experience into empathy except in special cases--with offspring or siblings or close friends. And presumably with clones...
...cause of this clonal empathy wouldn't be that your inner life was exactly like your clone's (it wouldn't be). The catalyst, rather, would be seeing that familiar face--the one in your high school yearbook, except with a better haircut. It would remind you that you and your clone were essentially the same, driven by the same hopes and fears. You might even feel you shared the same soul. And in a sense, this would be true. Then again, in a sense, you share the same soul with everyone...