Posted on 01/11/2005 12:29:05 PM PST by beavus
But without conception the chemical reactions would not take place.
So you're saying that just because humans can't observe something, it's not true or it can't exist? Sorry, but I'm not so pretentious as to believe that current human knowledge and ability are at the highest level in the universe. I'm sure earlier humans thought that they were "all that", and look at how we've advanced since then. In another 1,000 years, I'm sure we'll look like imbeciles compared to the people who will then be alive.
Earth to beavus!
Some of your proof is in post #61. Having had three children of my own, just take my word for it. Life begins at conception.
Science, my friend, has a long and ignominious history of promoting factual falsehoods.
Your objection to the idea of human life beginning and ending appears to be a simple semantic jump to the definition of the word "life" referring to the cellular level biological processes at work in human tissue. Frankly, that ain't what this thread is about and you know it.
To ignore the plain fact that a living human being did not exist nine months ago, but there is now a living, squirming, adorable newborn baby, and to torture the definition of the word "beginning" to exclude this process is the very definition of disingenuousness. To blithely pass by the event of a human's ceasing to breathe, his heartbeat stopped, his brain activity nonexistent and the flesh of his body quickly and entirely beginning to decay while declaring that a true "ending" has not occurred is equally silly.
And incidentally, concerning "rights", I imagine you are referring to Civil Rights - The right to life means just that. When the egg is fertilized life begins, thus the right to life, and civil rights, begins at that very moment. Sorry your mother dropped you on
YOUR head. Enough said.
With all due respect to Judge Bork, taken literally, his statement is factually incorrect. There is no meaningful moment. On small enough time scales, almost all biological process are continuous and smooth, especially complex ones such as conception.
After fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into existence. This is no longer a matter of taste or opinion. Each individual has a very neat beginning, at conception." Dr. Jerome Lejeune, genetics professor
His first sentence may be true, but his third sentence is plainly false, if by "beginning" he refers to a infinitessimal time point (which he most likely does not).
"By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception." Professor Hymie Gordon, Mayo Clinic.
Ditto. There is no specific "moment", but rather a process.
"The question as to when a human being begins is strictly a scientific question, and should be answered by human embryologists - not by philosophers, bioethicists, theologians, politicians, x-ray technicians, movie stars, or obstetricians and gynecologists."
Instead of being factually false, this one is just an opinion I disagree with. The issue is primarily one of rights.
"The question as to when a human person begins is a philosophical question - not a scientific question. I will not go into great detail here, but ""personhood"" begins when the human being begins - at fertilization."
Here I agree that it is a philosophical, not scientific, question. But if he means by "begin" that there is a specific meaningful time point, then he is factually in error.
Much of the rest of your posting are pretty standard biology, with no bearing on the issue, except to the extent that the biological descriptions presuppose the space-time continuum.
It is fine for scientists to speak to one another about "beginnings" and "moments" in some vague sense presupposing the underlying continua. However, too many lay people (such as yourself, apparently) take such language literally and actually come to believe that there are magical poofs in time. However, such poofs are at odds with our most abundant observations.
The reason I believe it is more of a philosophical question, is that the science of human biology does not address why we recognize rights in things. For one, the biology is qualitatively similar to the biology of rightsless things, such as lower animals. Second, the concept of rights was well-developed (mostly developed, really) before any knowledge of genetics and embryology. John Locke's notion of human rights was not held in suspense until we found out whether humans had 46 or 146 chromosomes. The empirical observations needed to understand rights were available to men thousands of years ago.
Prove to me the fetus is NOT alive
It is alive, in the sense that it has functioning cellular processes. "Life" is an ambinguous term. It can mean many things including "human life" and "individual human life". I think if we could come up with a less ambiguous term it would also help to better understand the issue.
"Right-to-lifers may say that this research proves that a fetus is alive, but it does not. It cannot." WHAT?!?!? Did this person realize the utter stupidity of that statement? A fetus is a living human being at its earliest development...when exactly does it become 'alive'? If it wasn't 'alive' we wouldn't he able to KILL IT!!!!
I agree. "Life" being ambiguous, there is no telling what the speaker meant, and he should have known better. In one sense of the word "life", he is clearly in factual error.
A magical point? It that the buzz word for conception? Complex issue? For people who want to rationalize abortions. At conception you exist....you start there and continue to develop.
Actually, the developmental continuum is everpresent. The speaker astutely used the word "magical" because some people believe that there is a discontinuity in space and time sometime around conception. The belief in such a discontinuity is magical thinking. Enough is known about biology, chemistry, and physics, to know that the continuum is not interrupted.
WAIT! I thought the fetuses weren't alive to begin with....so if they're not alive how can this research have anything to do with decided "whether fetuses should" live. Holy Cow... I am SO aggravated right now.....
What's aggravating to me is many different ways that "life" and "alive" are used in the same article. However, that does also reflect the confusion in the debate in general.
Costello: Fair enough. So you're saying that a person who commits murder isn't guilty of murder because the victim isn't really dead? I didn't think so.
Ah! I can help you here. You are not cognizant of the concept of a continuum. Disparate regions of a continuum ARE quite different even though near regions of a continuum are NOT significantly different. That is the definition of a continuum.
The process of human death (like nearly all biologic processes) falls along a continuum where in one region you are most certainly alive, and in another you are most certainly dead. However, near regions in that continuum involve billions of quite similar cellular events involving even smaller molecular events such as calcium transport. On that scale, one can find no meaningful dividing time point between life and death.
Your original statement -- life has no beginning or end, or something similar -- is a red herring in the abortion debate. Even if Life (with a capital "L") has no beginning or end, from a legal, social, and moral standpoint human life (small "l") does have a beginning and an end.
I don't know what you mean with your capitalization. Of course the law routinely sets necessarily arbitrary dividing points along continua as a practical matter. However, this should not be confused with any real understanding of the underlying process.
That is a VERY intersting and good question. I don't know the answer, although I'll bet it can be found on the Internet.
Thanks.
One of the underlying fundamentals of our universe is its continuity (some processes, especially on quantum scales, are so far below, or inaccessible to, measurement that we can presume they are discontinuous, but this does not apply to most biological phenomenon). This is so fundamental, that most scientists presume it is understood when they use language that literally seems to contradict it.
If you map out the events during conception on a molecular level, you will see millions of nearly identical events occurring in parallel and serially during the conception process. Those molecular events are so similar, that there is no instantaneous instant which has any useful meaning.
Such continua are seen throughout biology. That is why there is no meaningful instant at which hardly ANYTHING begins or ends in biology.
Your arrogance is exceeded only by your attempted obfuscation of simple concepts.
I don't see the arrogance, but I agree the concepts are very simple. That is why I don't understand why you have such difficulty with them.
Human life, the existence of a mortal, individual, living human being, does not rely on the space-time continuum,
Nearly everything we observe about human life follows the space-time continuum. Why would you think that human life has nothing to do with the laws of physics?
It's a simple, basic fact under continuous attack by those who would debase its value to the level of a wart: a tissue mass which poses an inconvenience to its bearer.
Those attacks are made extraordinarily easy by pro-lifers who defend their position with factually incorrect statements. If you to did manage to convince the world that humans have rights because of some magical event that is known to be false, then I sincerely fear for our species.
Studies such as this, joining the ranks of many before it, strengthen the position that an individual, mortal life does not suddenly spring into existence as the fetus passes through the birth canal. That baby is alive well before this blessed event. It is breathing, thinking, dreaming, hearing, moving, feeling and growing. It is a living human being.
Essentially true.
Conception IS the chemical reactions.
Life doesn't start at any point because it already exists.
You are taking two living cells and combining them to create a new member of the species. Conception is not the start of life, but a continuing of life. So, I will agree with you that there is no magical point where life starts, but since both living cells exist prior to combining, life already exists.
I reread my words, and that is not what I said regarding singularities. It is true that they haven't been observed. And that should not be surprising if one realizes what a singularity is. Singularities result from mathematical models of observable phenomena. Mathematics, which is the tool for our theories, is the abstraction of quantities from their physical observables. You can see one stick twice as large as another. From that you can abstract away the actual stick and form the concept of 'doubling'. Once this abstraction is made, infinity becomes a natural concept. The same is true of the infinitessimal. However, infinite and infinitessimals emerge only once we form that abstraction. As mathematical concepts, they are quite understandable. When one attempts to recombine them with concepts of other observable properties such as mass, length, etc., they become truly unimaginable (but the source of much poetry!). It is a fact that no infinite or infinitessimal quantity has been observed. From the mathematical definitions of infinite and infinitessimal, it is apparent that they could not be measured (infinite ruler? infinitessimal hashmarks?).
In another 1,000 years, I'm sure we'll look like imbeciles compared to the people who will then be alive.
Undoubtedly, but that does not mean that we do not know anything today.
Post 61 does not disprove what we see with our own eyes, nor does it disprove the laws of physics. Nor should the laws of physics and the fact of biological continua detract from your joyous experience or your love of human life.
Question_Assumptions said (in #25), "At no point in a person's lifecycle, from the moment they cease being a part of their respective parents and start being a distinct individual . . ."
That statement is incoherent because there is no point in a person's lifespan when he is a part of his parents. Parts are not wholes. Persons are wholes. Therefore parts are not persons.
- A8
Sure.
Your objection to the idea of human life beginning and ending appears to be a simple semantic jump to the definition of the word "life" referring to the cellular level biological processes at work in human tissue.
As long as you understand those semantics and realize that conception is a continuous process without a meaningful begining, then I'm good with that. You are in error, however, if you think that there isn't widespread belief in a magical discontinuity.
Frankly, that ain't what this thread is about and you know it.
I'm the one who started this thread!!! LOL!
To ignore the plain fact that a living human being did not exist nine months ago, but there is now a living, squirming, adorable newborn baby, and to torture the definition of the word "beginning" to exclude this process
I'm not doing that.
To blithely pass by the event of a human's ceasing to breathe, his heartbeat stopped, his brain activity nonexistent and the flesh of his body quickly and entirely beginning to decay while declaring that a true "ending" has not occurred is equally silly.
It would be silly if it weren't that many people truely believe that there is a literal ending point.
I'm not exactly sure how correcting people's false ideas on the matter of conception will change the debate. However, I suspect that some people think that human rights is dependent upon the existence of such a nonexistent point. In that case, anyone who cares about human rights, should care about correcting this fallacy.
I am referring to the philosophical notion of human rights, and not to any type of legal or authoritarian decree.
- The right to life means just that. When the egg is fertilized life begins, thus the right to life, and civil rights, begins at that very moment.
The trouble is, there is no meaningful moment that one can point to during the continuous process of fertilization. I'm not saying a zygote doesn't have rights. I am saying that there is no meaningful instant separating gametes from zygote. This should be obvious to you.
Sorry your mother dropped you on YOUR head.
She denies it.
Was she ok?
Yes! Exactly! Of all the times I've posted on this issue, you are only the second person to understand! The first was also on this very thread. It must be my lucky day.
I never cease to be amazed at the power of mental blocks. Why do you think continua are so hard for so many people to understand?
Why do you think people insist upon the fallacy of the magical poof at conception? Do you think that that insistence has any detrimental effect?
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