RE: Scientists plan to bring back Leonardo da Vinci... for starters...

I'm not in favor of our overlords cloning armies to replace us. However simply cloning DNA doesn't create people, and it is the environment in which DaVinci emerged that created his person and that enabled him to achieve remarkable understanding that stood out from the society of that day. It would not be so remarkable today.

"As far as I know, that would also bring back their personality, quirks, likes and dislikes, behaviour, etc."

The DNA isn't a mechanism that creates our persons. It is a mechanism that provide the physical structure, the scaffolding, if you will, our persons inhabit. Dr. Michael Levin has shown that our physiology, in fact, is planned and built not according to instructions encoded in our DNA, but in the consciousness our cells are availed. The cells communicate this physiological (and presumably our ego, the self, which is a management mechanism for the collective consciousness our cells share) plan through bioelectrical signaling. Levin has successfully learned to interfere with these communications in other species, enabling this physiological plan to be dramatically altered. He has enabled frogs to regrow limbs, for example, which they, like us, do not normally do, and has created planaria (flatworms) to adopt two or even three-headed body plans, which planaria do not normally do.*

In doing this he did not alter the DNA at all, nor change the chemistry of any physiological process in any way - except interfering with the bioelectrical intercellular signaling cells of macrocellular organisms communicate the body plans they grow from a single fertilized ovum. Simply reproducing the DNA a creature receives does not create their person, their self, that this intercellular network designs, and his research proves this.

Have a look at what he has shown and you will see that we are part of an organized consciousness collective that itself organizes our physiological body plan using the infrastructure our DNA provides, and also certainly imparts our ego, our sense we are an individual conscious person, and not the DNA.

Thanks!

Edit: *Significantly, while planaria will regrow from severed parts, like a starfish, when two headed planaria Dr. Levin has caused to be grown are separated into parts, each of those parts then regrows planaria with two heads. He does not have to again interfere with their growth. The collective consciousness of the shared intercellular network continues to follow the physiological plan Levin imparted to them prior to amputating the head of the two headed planaria from which subsequent generations are produced. This clearly is not something DNA does. It is the conscious decision of that collective consciousness macrocellular organisms manage via bioelectrical signaling.

This consciousness isn't created by our DNA, but is imparted by the consciousness of the sperm and egg, that each are members of the collective consciousness they sprang from, and thereby decide the nature of the new collective they are forming. DaVinci clones would not have these consciousnesses from the parents of the original DaVinci, and geneticists have no understanding of this aspect of cells, nor I suspect, do our overlords. The cells of the DaVinci clone would be availed of the consciousness of the egg they employ to impart the DNA they cobble together, and this would be much different than the original had. I doubt the clone would even physically mirror the original, because it is the physiology decided upon by the collective consciousness that chooses the specific physiology they design.

God help us if our overlords realize how to do this to us, as Levin has learned how to do this to planaria and frogs. For example, Levin has not learned how to regrow the frog from the severed limb, while planaria will regrow the whole planaria from a severed tail. Clearly the cellular network has the ability to decide to regrow a frog from the cells of the limb, because planaria do that, and so do starfish. Did our overlords know how to regrow entire people from a severed finger, I cannot imagine the horrors they would create, other than the vats containing all the severed parts of their clones being regrown into whole bodies. That is all the horror I can stand, already.