Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo

For a brief moment I thought this would be about something like robotic polo ponies, and considered the idea that four-legged high agility, high endurance robots had advanced significantly without me noticing.

The thing is, what if there's an even better horse out there? Once you get on the cloning bandwagon, don't you also lock yourself out of looking/evolving an even better horse?

>“It was the same,” he recalls. “Same movements, same head.... I couldn’t believe it.”

My grandpa said the same thing, first time he saw me.

Perhaps Polo will end up like competitive sailing with one-design classes based on the clone of horse. "Measurement" would be a blood test for drugs and dna.

Since we've reached this point, it seems like the next logical step would be to standardize the genomes allowed just like racing standardizes the vehicles (to a point, I know).

It seems so much less interesting for the competition to devolve to "who can afford the best horse genome" instead of the actual skill and ability of the player. Since we're already cloning the horses, just force everyone to use the same horse and compete on skill instead of money.

This is one of the many reasons I find modern "pro" sports so dreadfully uninteresting. The competition has next to nothing to do with how good the player is, and everything to do with how far their fabulously wealthy sponsor can push the rules without "technically" cheating.

Humans can likely be cloned too.

Imagine 10,000 Albert Einsteins and John von Neumanns working together with modern AI on medical, scientific, and societal issues.

Though there could be an Evil Einstein due to upbringing or something.

Surprised that the legal drama part of this wasn't discussed, it's how I first heard about this

https://youtu.be/VARJnzhVryc

Another Argentina/cloning-connected story is that President Javier Milei cloned his dog Conan at least four times: https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-04-26/the-myst...

The stories make me wonder if Argentina is a cloning hotspot, though I may be reading too much into two stories.

This reminds me of a poem in Analog Yearbook 2 (1978) by Jeff Rovin, with the title "The Horse That Jack Built".

Science fiction becomes science fact every day.

I hope they're aware of this:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00945-7

You can't clone forever.

> At the slightest touch of the reins, he felt a familiarity that shook him...

Ah... Some good, old, pre-AI journalism slop.

Oh the countless times a universities press release has been turned into four pages describing the smell of coffee some scientist inhales on their way through campus...

Given the way the world is now, I will not be surprised if full human cloning and replica people is a thing at some point in my lifetime, just like horses.

Though we are not yet competitive in the Argentinian Polo clone wars, we are making significant progress - https://www.satyress.com/

And i thought it was about those polo shirts and replicas of the horse logo on the “fake” t-shirts.

Me too, I guess I don’t think of “replica” and “clone” as synonymous in the context of animals.

That'd be alot more ethical than the current horse racing industry if it were the case.

Humans riding racing robots id watch, but not horse racing.

Surprised that the legal drama part of this wasn't discussed, it's how I first heard about this

https://youtu.be/VARJnzhVryc

This reminds me of a poem in Analog Yearbook 2 (1978) by Jeff Rovin, with the title "The Horse That Jack Built".

Science fiction becomes science fact every day.

Though we are not yet competitive in the Argentinian Polo clone wars, we are making significant progress - https://www.satyress.com/

A concerning amount of that product page is spent explaining how it has to slow down to pass through doorways, its inability to turn around in hallways, and its weak points you can use to disable one with a knife or gunshot. I feel like I'm reading a tutorial for how to defeat a tricky enemy in a video game.

This has to be some kind of kink thing. Not judging, just how it looks from first appearances.

The thing is, what if there's an even better horse out there? Once you get on the cloning bandwagon, don't you also lock yourself out of looking/evolving an even better horse?

I’m reminded of the old “do you want the boat, or what’s behind the door? It could be anything, even a boat!”

I’m not a polo player but in most games if you’ve already hit the 99.99th percentile, it’s not wise to roll the dice hoping to do better.

Yes, but developing a better horse has a low likelihood of success and a relatively long time horizon. There are some arms race dynamics here in that as long as no one else is trying to develop a better horse, you probably are better off just not trying to either.

So in industrial agriculture, monocultures are a real problem. Every banana is essentially a genetically identical Cavendish. It used to be the Gros Michel until a fungus basically killed it. The same fate awaits the Cavendish. This is true of lots of produce. We, as consumers, like identical produce. But this makes the entire species vulnerable to an enterprising fungus (or virus or bacteria) and it's arguably only a matter of time.

Could this happen if every polo horse basically ends up genetically identical? Probably not in the same way but new diseases do appear. Parvo is only 50 years old.

> what if there's an even better horse out there

Doesn't matter, such things threaten the horse investor lock in economics.

Many years past, an early bit of software from my student days was a side project making an easy to use database system for a horse stud farm, high status stallions being put to mares with the feed, vet visits, results, etc. all logged.

Horse racing is pretty much all about pedigree - without the lineage horses are considered valueless by the industry - super fast back country waler crosses might be acceptable for a four mile charge across open ground onto machine gun nests .. but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate that horse for racing.

I imagine Polo to be much the same, in the rich set. Probably more open and accepting out on the steppes knocking about the heads of the vanquished.

There’s commodities and then R&D. Ignoring every other moral consideration, this horse cloning has turned a biological asset into a (relative)commodity, and if people were looking for better horses they’d stick to the randomized mutation of regular breeding which has that built in as a feature.

This isn’t even the only instance of this technique. You can look at the Argentinian president Milei who hired a company to provide him with consistent advisors in the form of cloned dogs he talks with through a mystic[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_(Javier_Milei%27s_dog)

Looks very much like the only chance of that ever happening now is if someone established a separate league that only allows naturally conceived horses.

>“It was the same,” he recalls. “Same movements, same head.... I couldn’t believe it.”

My grandpa said the same thing, first time he saw me.

Perhaps Polo will end up like competitive sailing with one-design classes based on the clone of horse. "Measurement" would be a blood test for drugs and dna.

Since we've reached this point, it seems like the next logical step would be to standardize the genomes allowed just like racing standardizes the vehicles (to a point, I know).

Humans can likely be cloned too.

Imagine 10,000 Albert Einsteins and John von Neumanns working together with modern AI on medical, scientific, and societal issues.

Though there could be an Evil Einstein due to upbringing or something.

Another Argentina/cloning-connected story is that President Javier Milei cloned his dog Conan at least four times: https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-04-26/the-myst...

The stories make me wonder if Argentina is a cloning hotspot, though I may be reading too much into two stories.

Given the way the world is now, I will not be surprised if full human cloning and replica people is a thing at some point in my lifetime, just like horses.

And i thought it was about those polo shirts and replicas of the horse logo on the “fake” t-shirts.

That'd be alot more ethical than the current horse racing industry if it were the case.

Humans riding racing robots id watch, but not horse racing.

I’m reminded of the old “do you want the boat, or what’s behind the door? It could be anything, even a boat!”

I’m not a polo player but in most games if you’ve already hit the 99.99th percentile, it’s not wise to roll the dice hoping to do better.

Could this happen if every polo horse basically ends up genetically identical? Probably not in the same way but new diseases do appear. Parvo is only 50 years old.

> what if there's an even better horse out there

Doesn't matter, such things threaten the horse investor lock in economics.

I imagine Polo to be much the same, in the rich set. Probably more open and accepting out on the steppes knocking about the heads of the vanquished.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_(Javier_Milei%27s_dog)

Looks very much like the only chance of that ever happening now is if someone established a separate league that only allows naturally conceived horses.

They've already moved on to genetic engineering according to the article; no need to fuss with evolving a better horse when you can directly specify one.

At some point breeding programs will mostly be useful for identifying new mutations to splice into the main branch.

The way to determine how you know if you have picked the best horse to clone would be the secretary problem[1] for optimal stopping. This is somewhat plausible among polo horses because of the artificially small population size of pedigreed and trained horses.

The simple version of the problem is you ride about 1/e of the total population and then the first one that is better than all previous ones is your best option. For a pro polo player who would also breed and train others in the off season, over a multi-decade career, it's not perfect, but in aggregate, they are positioned to be pretty good.

Will there be black swan horses? Absolutely. They aren't even black swans, they're inevitable, but if your goal in the sport is to compound your average performance over time without significant setbacks (loss of a prize horse), then cloning a top player's best horse is a good bet.

I find the ethical discussions around horse cloning and sports lack a lot of domain competence in both what riding is, and the stewardship and biology it entails. From a sensory and ontological perspective, a horse is basically an alien being with a peanut sized brain that it falls to our species to be responsible for its existence. Cloning a few to adapt them for survival in our world is profoundly more humane than selling the surplus from breeding programs for meat or leaving them for predators and disease. Even though the philosophers comments about objectification were paraphrased for publication, their perspective is dumb.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Exploration-exploitation tradeoff strikes again

Was watching a documentary about chicken breeders [0] and they mention that genetics leads to grandchildren being VERY similar to the grandparents.

0 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4819510/

cloned horses are good at competitive sailing also?!?

What about the polo player's genome?

The next actual step according to the article is genetically engineering the horse clones. They've already crispr'd five as proof of concept.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

(quote by Stephen Jay Gould)

I am not sure if the Einsteins you clone would do what you want. Maybe they will want to be influencers on short video platforms.

Don't twin studies mostly show this wouldn't be the case?

I would watch him carefully if he grew a goatee or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(Star_Trek:_The...

You are such an optimist. We are more likely to get clones of athletes, and clones of billionaires for the organ donation options.

I doubt people like Jonas Salk would accept being cloned if they could help it

However unlikely it may be, when I see a wealthy celebrity with a doppleganger child the thought crosses my mind that they may have had themselves cloned.

The resemblance between young Donald Trump and his son Barron is uncanny, for example.

Nope, that's what relativistic slugs are for

That is where many of the nazi war doctors who escaped prosecution ended up…

I hope they're aware of this:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00945-7

You can't clone forever.

It's mentioned in the parent article.

Isn't the flaw with this method that they are using non-reproductive cells? Who knows how many cell divisions those have gone through.

If you can make clones from early embyro cells, you've sidestepped the problem.

> At the slightest touch of the reins, he felt a familiarity that shook him...

Ah... Some good, old, pre-AI journalism slop.

Oh the countless times a universities press release has been turned into four pages describing the smell of coffee some scientist inhales on their way through campus...

Me too, I guess I don’t think of “replica” and “clone” as synonymous in the context of animals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Seems like a carefully chosen term, maybe clone being too controversial.

I think replicant would be a fun term though. :)

In sports, sometimes you think you've maximized the potential of the human body after decades of competition, and then you get surprised (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_100_metres_world_recor... )

Perhaps the same is true for horses.

In the future, all football will be played by Messi clones and all hockey by Gretzkies.

Well, if there are 100,000 competitors and you want to win, then the 99.99th percentile isn't enough, and yes you would try to reach 99.999.

Is imagine the high pedigree horses are already so genetically similar to each other at this point that they're already vulnerable to that.

It makes sense to me if the buyer is concerned that the performance would revert towards the mean on second generation if you attempt to breed further. But... The new paradigm is not breeding, it's cloning. So it seems like "one shot" high performance steeds even without pedigree could be viable?

I feel like I am missing a lot.

Pedigree is often a scam.

I know a peer of the realm who made pretty much his entire fortune on forged horses - he was breeding to make fast horses, but the pedigree was a load of, well, horseshit. All started because he’d bought a stallion who shot blanks.

Now it’s all about eight generations deep so he’s safe at this point, as they’re their own pedigree now.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on cows. There's a whole black market genomics industry going on in the uk right now, and probably elsewhere, too.

> but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate

sounds like an opportunity. as horse racing has a monetary reward associated with success one imagines a moneyball sort of play that you can compound by betting on your horse which the oddsmakers are going to handicap because it "doesn't have the pedigree" (at least the first few go arounds)

You forgot the /s

That is a slam campaign by Milei's political opposition; the company the article mentions (perPETuate) only collects DNA for when cloning becomes feasible. That Time magazine and NY Times repeated the silliness is more a reflection upon modern editorial standards than anything else.

*the Secretariat puzzle

Seems like a carefully chosen term, maybe clone being too controversial.

I think replicant would be a fun term though. :)

Well, if there are 100,000 competitors and you want to win, then the 99.99th percentile isn't enough, and yes you would try to reach 99.999.

Was watching a documentary about chicken breeders [0] and they mention that genetics leads to grandchildren being VERY similar to the grandparents.

0 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4819510/

I would watch him carefully if he grew a goatee or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(Star_Trek:_The...

You are such an optimist. We are more likely to get clones of athletes, and clones of billionaires for the organ donation options.

I doubt people like Jonas Salk would accept being cloned if they could help it

Nope, that's what relativistic slugs are for

It's mentioned in the parent article.

that's a forward thinking robotics company right there. putting in weakspots for when the centaur robot revolution begins. so we have a chance.

This has to be some kind of kink thing. Not judging, just how it looks from first appearances.

yeah, I can't really tell whether that whole thing was serious or satirizing something.

Ah yes. The reverse centaur position for AI/human intercourse.

In the future, all football will be played by Messi clones and all hockey by Gretzkies.

And honestly I’m there for it. Can you imagine the level of play?

I feel like I am missing a lot.

Can you imagine the insanity when they try to do "LLM style" sequencing?

Pedigree is often a scam.

Now it’s all about eight generations deep so he’s safe at this point, as they’re their own pedigree now.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on cows. There's a whole black market genomics industry going on in the uk right now, and probably elsewhere, too.

I can only agree. Hard.

It's less about the horse, the speed, the actual genetics - it's all about the process, the appearance, the gate-keeping.

Country Clubs for horses (and cows, etc)

> but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate

There is a wee bit of money to be made winning a race, sure.

Here's a question though (can vary by country and racing industry), how do the winnings from racing (as a distribution) compare to the earnings from pedigree breeding, stud fees, sperm straw sales, etc.?

I agree there's room for disruption, just as there is from (say) the iron grip of the US Home Owners Associations and other cartels, but expect a lot of regulatory push back from the insiders.

The, ah, American Quarter Horse Association won't let any old nag run if they can help it.

You forgot the /s

I did not forget a /s.

The Wikipedia page has linked references. You’ll have to provide more evidence for me than your statement for me to disbelieve them after I read through to confirm that the Wikipedia article wasn’t misinterpreting or misquoting.

cloned horses are good at competitive sailing also?!?

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

(quote by Stephen Jay Gould)

I don't see the point of your comment besides sidestepping a clearly revolutionary mind and an interesting scenario.

I am not sure if the Einsteins you clone would do what you want. Maybe they will want to be influencers on short video platforms.

Don't twin studies mostly show this wouldn't be the case?

However unlikely it may be, when I see a wealthy celebrity with a doppleganger child the thought crosses my mind that they may have had themselves cloned.

The resemblance between young Donald Trump and his son Barron is uncanny, for example.

Narcissists date people that have physical features they see in themselves.

That is where many of the nazi war doctors who escaped prosecution ended up…

Seems Brazil lost its early lead after cloning Hitler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_(film)

yeah, I can't really tell whether that whole thing was serious or satirizing something.

Ah yes. The reverse centaur position for AI/human intercourse.

Ah horse “iron’man” race where the horse had to be swam (or sailed) sailed 25 km would indeed be epic and also great for the resurgence of sailng as practical transport. Probably cruel for the horses though.

I don't see the point of your comment besides sidestepping a clearly revolutionary mind and an interesting scenario.

Seems to be working pretty well in the case of these horses.

Narcissists date people that have physical features they see in themselves.

Not as many as the ones that the US snatched in operation paperclip

Seems Brazil lost its early lead after cloning Hitler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_(film)

that's a forward thinking robotics company right there. putting in weakspots for when the centaur robot revolution begins. so we have a chance.

Unless those weak spots are quietly addressed by a Field Service Bulletin, just before the revolution kicks off.

And honestly I’m there for it. Can you imagine the level of play?

there certainly won't be much defending going on with the Messi clones :)

I can only agree. Hard.

It's less about the horse, the speed, the actual genetics - it's all about the process, the appearance, the gate-keeping.

Country Clubs for horses (and cows, etc)

At some point moving up the luxury scale the price is less about product and more about buyer psychology.

I can sell a ripped t-shirt, but that same product coming from an upscale exclusive boutique owned by so-and-so’s wife is participation in a whole ecosystem with lots of signalling to other buyers in the same financial strata.

Memories of the Glock family and their horses ;)

Turns out they made a little more than just a few piddly guns...

There is a wee bit of money to be made winning a race, sure.

I agree there's room for disruption, just as there is from (say) the iron grip of the US Home Owners Associations and other cartels, but expect a lot of regulatory push back from the insiders.

The, ah, American Quarter Horse Association won't let any old nag run if they can help it.

If someone came in and moneyballed the sport with no name horses, wouldn’t their stud fee rise with wins? New lineage would start.

They've already moved on to genetic engineering according to the article; no need to fuss with evolving a better horse when you can directly specify one.

At some point breeding programs will mostly be useful for identifying new mutations to splice into the main branch.

Unless those weak spots are quietly addressed by a Field Service Bulletin, just before the revolution kicks off.

Isn't the flaw with this method that they are using non-reproductive cells? Who knows how many cell divisions those have gone through.

If you can make clones from early embyro cells, you've sidestepped the problem.

Seems to be working pretty well in the case of these horses.

Funny that despite Neuromancer's prophesying the ubiquity of gene-splicing in future culture, William Gisbon specifically discounted it in this instance. As per the Finn: "Arabs still trying to code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak".

The point of my comment is to call attention to the SV tendency of hyper-focusing on the newest shiny toy as a solution to all problems while ignoring the real solutions to the real problems we have right now.

If we assume roughly 1.2k people were as smart as Einstein when he was born then, thanks to birth rates, we could have our "10000 Albert Einsteins" today. Statistically speaking ~3k of them alone were born in either India or China and are probably working a regular, badly-to-okay paid job [1]. We could be recruiting them today.

But no one cares about that because the premise is flawed and it's not about solving "medical, scientific, and societal issues". It's about making money and chasing "interesting scenarios" instead of actual solutions. As the meme format goes, men will literally clone Albert Einstein's brain instead of giving proper funding to schools.

And sure, chasing SF scenarios is fun, but let's not pretend that any of it is about making society better. As the sibling comment points out, we are more likely to get a clone of Rupert Murdoch than one of Stephen Hawking.

[1] For extra irony we can imagine a non-zero number of them work for patent offices.

I think part of the point is that Einstein’s genius was only partially the brain. It was also a unique upbringing in a specific point in time that made it possible. We would have many more geniuses if we game more people the opportunities.

Not as many as the ones that the US snatched in operation paperclip

Exactly, the dog was cloned in the US

Is imagine the high pedigree horses are already so genetically similar to each other at this point that they're already vulnerable to that.

*the Secretariat puzzle

Memories of the Glock family and their horses ;)

Turns out they made a little more than just a few piddly guns...

Exactly, the dog was cloned in the US

What about the polo player's genome?

Exploration-exploitation tradeoff strikes again

This is easy enough to solve if you use a cloned horse that has had some CRISPR genetics done so that it now has fish gills and can breathe as normally underwater as it can on land. You probably drown a few horses before you find one that swims well but, as we all know, once you identify that one horse that can manage that feat you have a monopoly on the game.

[1] For extra irony we can imagine a non-zero number of them work for patent offices.

Well it would certainly help to know before they're born which children are going to be Einstein. Maybe with ten thousand of them around we could ask some to help sort the education system out.

Perhaps the same is true for horses.

Wasn't there a study whose result was that people are not actually running faster but the better results are mostly attributed to changing/improving grounds and better shoes?

Edit: Can't find the study anymore. This one [1] at least partially attributes to material.

[1] https://www.balticsportscience.com/journal/vol17/iss2/2/

there certainly won't be much defending going on with the Messi clones :)

At some point moving up the luxury scale the price is less about product and more about buyer psychology.

If someone came in and moneyballed the sport with no name horses, wouldn’t their stud fee rise with wins? New lineage would start.

The next actual step according to the article is genetically engineering the horse clones. They've already crispr'd five as proof of concept.

I did not forget a /s.

Can you imagine the insanity when they try to do "LLM style" sequencing?

> I can sell a ripped t-shirt, but that same product coming from an upscale exclusive boutique owned by so-and-so’s wife is participation in a whole ecosystem with lots of signalling to other buyers in the same financial strata

This is only true for the lower financial strata though. It’s only the poorer people for whom shopping in so-and-so’s wife’s boutique is a meaningful experience.

Yep. Some of my pants have rips and visibly bad stitching because I ripped them and am bad at stitching. Then I see people at the same parties buying brand new ripped pants. At least I fit in, I guess.

You'd expect so and it's bound to have been done, it's still one of those domains where the establishment (owners, trainers, breeders, jockeys, track associations, etc) is weighted against outsiders.

Money would count, but I dare say it'd need a bit of crafty social engineering running in parallel to crack in.

Caveat: I'm not a horse racing / polo insider - I did some contract work years back and rubbed shoulders with a bunch of millionaire horsey types.

Are they doing transformer-training on the population?

You'd expect so and it's bound to have been done, it's still one of those domains where the establishment (owners, trainers, breeders, jockeys, track associations, etc) is weighted against outsiders.

Money would count, but I dare say it'd need a bit of crafty social engineering running in parallel to crack in.

Caveat: I'm not a horse racing / polo insider - I did some contract work years back and rubbed shoulders with a bunch of millionaire horsey types.

This is only true for the lower financial strata though. It’s only the poorer people for whom shopping in so-and-so’s wife’s boutique is a meaningful experience.

Are they doing transformer-training on the population?

Well it would certainly help to know before they're born which children are going to be Einstein. Maybe with ten thousand of them around we could ask some to help sort the education system out.

Wasn't there a study whose result was that people are not actually running faster but the better results are mostly attributed to changing/improving grounds and better shoes?

Edit: Can't find the study anymore. This one [1] at least partially attributes to material.

[1] https://www.balticsportscience.com/journal/vol17/iss2/2/

Training has also evolved drastically over time at the highest end of athletics. Periodization, nutrition, recovery and the size of the talent pool being scouted are all occurring alongside the advances in materials and equipment. It would be difficult to separate them effectively.

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