The Science of Discworld II

It’s a major story, but very few newspapers are reporting the most likely result of this attempt, which will be abject failure. It took 277 failures, many rather nasty, before Dolly the Sheep was cloned, and she has now been found to have serious genetic defects, poor lamb.
    Trying to clone a human may indeed be unethical, but that’s not the best reason for objecting to this misguided and foolish attempt. The best reason is that it won’t work, because nobody yet knows how to overcome numerous technical obstacles; moreover, if by some stroke of (mis)fortune it did happen to work, any child produced would have serious defects. Producing such a child, now that is unethical.
    Making ‘carbon copies’ of human beings, which is the usual basis of the newspapers’ story about the ethics, is beside the point. That’s not what cloning does, anyway. Dolly the Sheep was not genetically identical to her mother, though she came close. Even if she had been, she would still have been a different sheep, moulded by different experiences. For that matter, the same would be true even if she was genetically identical to her mother. For the same reason, cloning a dead child will not bring that child back to life. Much of the media discussion of the ethics of cloning, like much of the public understanding of science, is vaguely stirred through with science fiction. In this arena,as in so many, the power of the story outweighs any questions about the real factual basis.
    Human beings do not just tell stories, or just listen to them. They are more like Granny Weatherwax, who is aware of the power of story on Discworld, and refuses to be trapped by the story’s narrativium. Instead, she uses the power of story to mould events according to her own wishes. Roundworld priests, politicians, scientists, teachers and journalists have learned to use the power of story to get their messages across to the public, and to manipulate or persuade people to behave in particular ways. The ‘scientific method’ is a defence mechanism against that kind of manipulation. It tells you not to believe things because you want them to be true. The proper scientific response to any new discovery or theory, especially your own, is to look for ways to disprove it. That is, to try to find a different story that explains the same things.
    The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans , the storytelling chimpanzee.
    At this point, the structure of The Science of Discworld 2: The Globe becomes very self-referential. You will need to bear that in mind as we proceed. The book is itself a story – no – two intertwined stories. One, the odd-numbered chapters, is a Discworld fantasy. The other, the even-numbered chapters, is a story of the science of the Mind (metaphysical again). The two are closely related, designed to fit together like foot and glove; 7 the science story is presented as a series of Very Large Footnotes to the fantasy story.
    So far, so good … but it gets more complicated. When you read a Discworld story, you play a curious mental game. You react as if the story is true, as if Discworld actually exists, as if Rincewind and the Luggage are real, and Roundworld is but a fragment of a long-forgotten dream. (Please stop interrupting, Rincewind, we know it’s different from your point of view. Yes, of course we’re the ones thatdon’t exist, we’re bundles of rules whose consequences take place only inside a small globe on a dusty shelf in Unseen University. Yes, we do appreciate that, and will you please shut up? ) Sorry about that.
    People have become very good at playing this game, and we will exploit that by setting Earth and Discworld on the same narrative level, so that each illuminates the other. In the first book, The Science of Discworld , the Discworld defined what is real. That’s why reality makes such good sense. Roundworld is a magical construct, designed to keep the magic out, and that’s why it makes no sense at all (to wizards, at least). In this sequel Earth acquires inhabitants, the inhabitants acquire minds, and minds do strange things. They bring narrativium to a story-less universe.
    A computer can do a billion sums in the blink of a keystroke and get them all right, but