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First of all, I apologize for the “what are you smoking” crack. It was uncalled for.

I didn’t say that A = B in all ways. Obviously a zygote is not equal to a 35 year old man in many ways. All I said was that the being of both is the same: human being rather than amoebic or frog or cantaloupe being.

We are all constantly in development. I am the same being I was when I was three minutes old but my height, weight, consciousness, motor skills, age and so forth are different. The baby three minutes before it is born is different in many ways from three minutes after it is born—inside a womb, outside a womb, breathing in vastly different ways, and so on and so forth. But it did not become a human being after not being a human being the moment it was born. It WAS a human being all the time. The only issue is whether this identity of being, despite immense differences in other ways, continues all the way back to conception. And unless one can point to a line of demarcation in terms of be-ing at some point between conception and birth and adolescence and middle age and old age, then the “is” of the thing IS human at conception.

No one doubts that an infant shares identical being with a fully developed adult. The difference in development is huge. But degree of development is not a difference in be-ing. Clearly immense development takes place in the womb. At what point, however, did something non-human become human? What portion or point of the development constitutes a change in ISNESS?

So, that A can become B does not mean A = B is both true and false. A does not equal B in degree of development but in terms of being, something that can become something IS always what it IS: frog, muskrat, salamander. Tadpoles become adult frogs. Is tadpole being different being from frog being? No. Tadpoles by definition are immature stages of the development of frogs. As a category of being, they are either developed frogs, partly developed frogs, less developed frogs, but they never go from being applesauce to being frogs. Apples can go from being apples on a tree to being applesauce but the appleness is the same. Its consistency changes when the apple is “sauced” but the being is still apple being, even though some sugar and cinnamon may have been added. (You can have applesauce without adding anything to it. It may not be to your taste but what makes apples into appelsauce is saucing the apples.)

A human zygote goes from that to an embryo to a foetus to an infant to a child to an adolescent to a young adult to a middle-aged man to an old man but all the way through he is a human being, rather than at one point being a mule zygote and then shifting to a human embryo or perhaps going from mule zygote to mule embryo but turning into a human foetus before being born as an infant armadillo.

Or, at least so common sense would say.