Pharyngula: Bye bye, RA

#1

It is interesting to notice how gradual his slide was. I wrote this in an APPROVING commentary of one of his posts written in October 2004.

Posted by: coturnix | June 23, 2006 10:56 PM

#2

Huh... I'll take you guys word for his past statements. To me, without historical context, the material currently on his front page reads like... like a christian construct of a "good," possibly convertible athiest. Or a christian posing as an athiest, the comments like saying you could take the money from the collection plate at the end of the service because there's "no god to stop you" seem... off.
Again, this is just without any past reading of the site, but that was my intuition never having visited the site before.
I could be way off base, but I think it's still interesting that that's how it appeared to me.

Posted by: Fox1 | June 23, 2006 11:05 PM

#3

Please excuse my rambling repetition above, it's been a long shift.

Posted by: Fox1 | June 23, 2006 11:06 PM

#4

I can barely stomach TRA. I don't agree with his anti-choice stance, and he largely comes off as an arrogant asshole. I also find it ironic how he labels believers as "godidiots" while it's a very safe bet that the people he works with at a PCC are by and large "godidiots."

Posted by: Sexy Sadie | June 23, 2006 11:33 PM

#5

he seems to think something special happens at fertilization that unambiguously and unarbitrarily defines a human being

So you want to leave defining a person arbitrary. Shouldn't there be some hard and fast definition? Well no:

I say that humanity is something that emerges gradually and is far more complex than having the right number of chromosomes and a certain set of genes: information is added continuously during development, and it's a serious mistake to think everything that defines you is already present at conception. It's worse than a mistake; I think it trivializes what it means to be a human being, reducing it to cartoon genetics

You slay me with your moral high ground crap. You have no morals if you leave defining a human as arbitrary and ambiguous.

Posted by: NatureSelectedMe | June 23, 2006 11:54 PM

#6

PZ,
I find it interesting that you repeatedly use the term "pro-life" instead of anti-abortion or anti-choice. You seem to have adopted their language. What gives?

Posted by: Gerry L | June 23, 2006 11:58 PM

#7

TA's argument against abortion would work better if time travel existed. If my mother decides to travel back in time to her first trimester so that she could abort that pregnancy, we'd expect I would have something to say about it. I might even try to get a court injunction preventing her from doing it, as it would mean I would never exist. I might even be said to have a right to my existence now that it has been established, now that I am extricated with this world, with those I love and love me, etc. But embryos--potential persons--are not typically seen as meriting such rights.

TA's granting of rights to potential persons is like a teenager trying to use a college library or gym when he is not yet enrolled at that college, and, on being turned away, complaining, "but I am a potential student here!"

Posted by: cm | June 24, 2006 12:12 AM

#8

You have no morals if you leave defining a human as arbitrary and ambiguous.

Illogical. Not all morality requires explicit and precise definitions of a human being. Defining a thing as human does not make it a human being. Finally, although it is certainly possible that PZ has no clear criteria for determining whether a thing is a human being, the absence of a statement from him clarifying those criteria does not in itself constitute evidence that he has no such criteria.

Posted by: Caledonian | June 24, 2006 12:15 AM

#9

Earlier this year I noticed that the Raving Atheist was approaching my limit for exasperation, so I dropped his site from my Bloglines roster. It particularly perturbed me that he was willing to embrace the fringe position of some of the more extreme Protestant sects that Catholics aren't Christians. Excuse me? That was just too silly, although merely another straw on the camel's back. His rantings on "pro-life" issues, however, were a veritable haystack (and good luck trying to find the needle of reason therein).

RA is on some weird trajectory where the emphasis appears to be more on the "raving" than on the "atheist". A few more turns of the wheel and chances are he'll be groveling before a crucifix.

Posted by: Zeno | June 24, 2006 12:27 AM

#10

Defining a thing as human does not make it a human being

For example? I've got some mathematical background where definitions are important.

Posted by: NatureSelectedMe | June 24, 2006 12:31 AM

#11

Easy: a tissue sample that comes from a human being is human, in the sense that it is a human tissue sample. It is not human in the sense that it is a human being. I do not commit mass murder when I vacuum up my own skin flakes, nor do I when I comb my hair.

The ambiguity in English blurs the two meanings of 'human' together. Nevertheless, they are separate and distinct.

Posted by: Caledonian | June 24, 2006 12:35 AM

#12

P Z Myers wrote:

His rationalizations for pro-life extremism simply don't make sense:

That depends on what you mean by "pro-life extremism". They do not justify criminal behaviour. Otherwise, they make good sense.

he seems to think something special happens at fertilization that unambiguously and unarbitrarily defines a human being.

He thinks, as I do, that fertilization is the point at which the event we recognise as an individual human life begins. As he points out, it makes at least as much sense to place it there as at an arbitrary number of days or weeks later - more so, in fact.

Diploidy is not the scientific term for ensoulment.

Neither he nor I have suggested that it is.

Genetic specification is not sufficient to specify an individual.

No one is suggesting that the entirety of a human life is written in the genes. But without that initial genetic specification there is no individual human life at all.

Potential is not a synonym for actuality.

That depends on how seriously you take the physical concept of "timescape". If the past and the future are as real as the present then the difference between "potential" and "actual" is simply a matter of temporal perspective.

Fertilization is not a switch that triggers an ineluctable program towards individuality. The combinatorial uniqueness of an individual's genome is inadequate to define the individual.

But without it there is no individual. How much more essential can it be?

An architectural blueprint does not describe a structure atom-by-atom nor does it encode a complete history of the building from construction to demolition. But without it, the particular building it specifies would not exist.

A human being is many things over his or her lifetime: a fetus, a newborn, an infant, a child, an adolescent, a young adult, a middle-aged adult, an old person and, ultimately, a corpse. Each, in its time, appears to be a distinct object. Each differs, in varying degrees, to what went before and what comes after; the newborn baby looks very little like the old person it will become in the fullness of time. But they are all part-and-parcel of the whole individual life. They are all simply stages in one continuous event. If that life has value - is entltled to basic rights - at some stages of its existence, why not at all?

Posted by: Ian H Spedding | June 24, 2006 12:40 AM

#13

The ambiguity in English blurs the two meanings of 'human' together.

I see your point. It still doesn't answer at what point tissue becomes a human being endowed with unalienable rights. The only liberal stance on that point is... Do we really have to decide? It's so hard. We might hurt someone's feelings.

Posted by: NatureSelectedMe | June 24, 2006 12:50 AM

#14

There's a special kind of troll out there in the blogosphere, one that pretends to be an atheist or agnostic, ...and then... over time gets Jesusified.

It's a total charade of course, and I cannot believe that I've actually read posts from people with little more time on their hands than that.

But I have.

This guy sounds like one of them...

Posted by: Mumon | June 24, 2006 1:03 AM

#15

Ian H. Spedding writes: If that life has value - is entltled to basic rights - at some stages of its existence, why not at all?

I think that a very good question for people to get straight, at least in their own minds, is why we value the life of a human so much more than the life of, say, a mouse or an octopus. I'm not going to try to give a definitive answer, because I'm sure everyone who has thought about it has a different answer, but I would like to ask you whether you really think that your own reasons for valuing human life over that of other animals applies equally well in the case of a one-day-old embryo.

Posted by: Daryl McCullough | June 24, 2006 1:11 AM

#16

"...a reckless disregard for truth and accuracy, an intellectual laziness, a distaste for open discourse, and an abandonment of basic principles of decency which I just don't understand. I've never experienced anything close to it in my interactions with believers."

??

he's kidding, right? that statement alone would immediately make me think this guy hasn't got a clue. Heck, it's typically been the creobots that I've found fit his description of uncivil discourse to a proverbial "T":

reckless disregard for truth: check
intellectual laziness: check
distaste for open discourse: check

I find creobots to exhibit these behaviors continually.

After reading the first paragraph of TA's blog, and seeing this statement, his credibility on just about anything else would take a big nosedive in my book.

Posted by: Ichthyic | June 24, 2006 1:12 AM

#17

" A few more turns of the wheel and chances are he'll be groveling before a crucifix."

more like stuck in therapy!

like you said, the "raving" part seems to be gaining dominance.

as in "stark raving mad".

Posted by: Ichthyic | June 24, 2006 1:18 AM

#18

If that life has value - is entltled to basic rights - at some stages of its existence, why not at all?

Not everyone agrees that a fetus is entitled to basic rights.

Posted by: Sexy Sadie | June 24, 2006 2:03 AM

#19

He thinks, as I do, that fertilization is the point at which the event we recognise as an individual human life begins. As he points out, it makes at least as much sense to place it there as at an arbitrary number of days or weeks later - more so, in fact.

Not particularly. A large number of fertilized eggs never implant. Even after it does, there's the liklihood of a natural sponteneous abortion, where the implanted fetus is washed away. Roughly half of all fertilized embryos never make it to the "pregnancy" stage. Then there's the issues of twins: there are many more twins that form during pregancy than are actually born. The second child is often "discarded" by the body before long in the developmental process.

If you place the status of "human life" at fertilization at the moral equivalent of "human life" at birth, then you have to accept that the reproductive system is an abattoir under the most normal and natural of circumstances.

I personally think "birth" is a much more appropriate dividing point. Roe vs Wade places it at the third trimester, where survival and self-sufficiency of the fetus is at least possible apart from the mother. Leviticus in the Bible places it at Birth+1 month.

No one is suggesting that the entirety of a human life is written in the genes. But without that initial genetic specification there is no individual human life at all. [...] But without it there is no individual. How much more essential can it be?

So a genetic clone is not an individual human? Identical twins are not individual human life?

That depends on how seriously you take the physical concept of "timescape". If the past and the future are as real as the present then the difference between "potential" and "actual" is simply a matter of temporal perspective.

I'm not sure whether to sing "Every Sperm is Sacred" for the billions of "potentials" fired into my gym sock, or start raving about the TIME CUBE.

A human being is many things over his or her lifetime: a fetus, a newborn, an infant, a child, an adolescent, a young adult, a middle-aged adult, an old person and, ultimately, a corpse. Each, in its time, appears to be a distinct object. Each differs, in varying degrees, to what went before and what comes after; the newborn baby looks very little like the old person it will become in the fullness of time. But they are all part-and-parcel of the whole individual life. They are all simply stages in one continuous event. If that life has value - is entltled to basic rights - at some stages of its existence, why not at all?

Most people know the difference between a child and a corpse, and which one has more in the way of basic rights. =/

But on the actual point, we understand that children are not adults, and children do not have the same rights and privaleges as adults. It's why we have "Age of Consent", "Age of Majority", and similar laws, which gradually give children the full rights we give adults. We understand that the unique phase of their development requires them to be protected to a greater extent, and thus have less freedoms as a result. And a child isn't even as truely different as a fetus.

The major difference between a fetus and any other stage between birth and death is that the fetus is not an individual organism. While genetically different, it is completely dependant on the body of the mother to survive. So in the case of a conflict, which should have more rights: a partially developed being that cannot survive apart from the body of the mother, or the adult human being which has a potential human being inside her? I think the choice is perfectly clear, especially if it means a better quality of life for all of those already born.

Posted by: Left_Wing_Fox | June 24, 2006 2:40 AM

#20

The only liberal stance on that point is... Do we really have to decide? It's so hard. We might hurt someone's feelings.

No, the liberal stance is that it's the pregnant woman's choice. Anti-abortionists always hate the idea of women having a choice.

Posted by: Zarquon | June 24, 2006 2:55 AM

#21

Raving Atheist have always seen a bit odd to me, and this just goes on to justify my initial feelings.

And PZ, please don't use the anti-choice crowds' double-speak. They are certainly not pro-life in any meaningful sense.

Posted by: Kristjan Wager | June 24, 2006 3:40 AM

#22

The anti-abortion crowd claims to have concern about the sanctity of life, yet for them that only seems to concern the fetus. Once the child is born, they wash their hands about its life.

They oppose aid programs to poor families in city ghettos or rural backwaters. They are happy with a world where 80% or more of the inhabitants live at subsistance level or less. Where is the sanctity of life then?

As a saying goes, god so loved the poor that he made a lot of them. The former Pope could go down in history as the greatest mass murderer of all time for his opposition to family planning and the use of condoms to help prevent Aids. He did have help though from the Bush administration's refusing aid for the same things.

Posted by: bernarda | June 24, 2006 4:39 AM

#23

Right on Bernarda, KW, Z, and many others above.

To speak personally:

First I am a father who began loving all his potential children from the second we became aware of the pregnancies. However, I didn't fall all to pieces when one pregnancy failed after several weeks. I knew we'd have other chances and that helped. But I also rationally knew that those aborted cells -- cells that we were treating as the most important thing in our lives just prior to the miscarriage -- were NOT a real person by any rational criteria!

I always felt during all of our pregnancies that I would have an extremely hard time deciding to abort if a problem was detected. At the time, in private mental "practice scenarios," I always decided NO unless the problem was very profound! Who knows what WE'D have actually done. BUT also I NEVER NEVER felt that anyone - State or person - had any right whatsoever to restrict choices we might have needed and wanted to make. To us it was and it is an INalienable right to control your own body and private life.

Yes yes I know you ANTI-CHOICE people will give examples of restrictions on our right to control our own being. BUT WHAT MAKES THOSE RIGHT!! Maybe just tradition or some moralistic superimposition!?! I don't buy using examples of restrictions to justify MORE restrictions, so save your breath!

No give me FREEDOM any day. Rational people with FREEDOM eventually come to the best NET positive value. FREEDOM allows societies to come to true positive moral equilibrium for themselves. To EVOLVE to more perfect beings if I may be so bold as to mention the "E" word.

Thus, I see the motto on our money as counterproductive to both freedom and to gaining a HIGHER moral and just society. IN GOD WE TRUST is a bloody cop-out; it actually sets the bar TOO LOW! FREE humans will eventually make BETTER decisions than a god fixated and modeled after some ancients' pipe dreams, and who is represented on Earth by some of the most neurotic, needy, controlling, irrational, dangerous, and fanatically inclined blokes god could have ever created! I don't want them in any way controlling our bodies, our thoughts, our actions, our lives!!

Ok said my piece. Thanks for the forum. Pace.

Posted by: ConcernedJoe | June 24, 2006 7:09 AM

#24

Hi all,

New person to the group. Yes, I am an atheist, and no, I am not on the route to Christianity....

Mr. Spedding (above) and even the RA make some good points. A human being begin at conception. A sperm or an egg alone will not develop into a human being. A fertilized egg, barring a natural abortion or a man-made one, will. One poster mentioned that some embryos are aborted naturally. This is true, but there is certain difference between life ending due to natural causes and life ending due to the intervention of mankind.

Another poster mentioned tissue coming from other parts of the body also being human. But you cannot take a piece of your skin and put it into a woman's womb and expect a human being to develop.

I think the science is behind Mr. Spedding. A human being begins at conception and continues throughout its life cycle- however long that life cycle may be. It may only be a few minutes, hours, days, or years. But from conception until death is the life cycle for that particular human being (or human beings in the case of twins).

Now, having said all that, I am not an anti-choice advocate. We live in a world in which human life is, unfortunately, destroyed all the time. So-called "collateral damage" during war is an example. I think we must, as a society, determine when a developing human being can be given the "right" of "personhood." RA seems to make the case that the right of personhood should be given to the oocyte. Others think that right comes just as the fetus exits the vaginal canal. I don't agree with either of these examples, because I don't think a group of cells necessarily should be given the full rights of personhood, but neither do I think that a baby just suddenly becomes a person deserving of rights only as it is born. Was it not a baby just a few minutes prior to birth?

This is a not an easy issue, in my opinion. But it is one that we as a society must struggle with. Given the differences of opinion about when a developing human life deserves full "personhood", my personal opinion is that Roe v. Wade had it right.

Posted by: HumanistFireman | June 24, 2006 8:16 AM

#25

It seems like grasping at straws for anti-abortionists to claim there is some underlying biological basis for their opposition to abortion. That an embryo is a "potential" human being just means that it isn't one now. Does the anti-abortionist mourn the demise of genetic material every time they skin their knee, because some day it could be used to clone a new human being?

Posted by: BrianT | June 24, 2006 8:17 AM

#26

By the way, PZ, I love your posts about Mr., oops, I mean Ms. Coulter.....

Posted by: HumanistFireman | June 24, 2006 8:20 AM

#27

If I may shill, Bitch PhD has a couple of really good posts about abortion rights. They take the focus off of the exact minute a group of cells becomes human with rights, and place it back on the woman in question. Her main point is that the argument is really about whether women are smart enough to take all of those factors into consideration for themselves, or if it has to be legislated for them.

http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2004/10/abortion.html

http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2005/04/do-you-trust-women.html

Posted by: Carlie | June 24, 2006 8:48 AM

#28

A human being begin at conception.

So if ten days later the product of conception divide into twins, when did THEY begin? Or does that amount to an existential reboot?

Looking at the question of when a human being "begins" from another angle (and realizing that I'm treading on perilous ground here, as I'm not a scientist) -- seems to me that any organism, including a human being, is a stage in a process stretching back to the beginning of life on this planet -- 4 billion years, give or take, I believe. And if life got here on asteroids from another planet, one could argue that the beginnings of this process are beyond the reach of our current understanding.

Anyway, consider that over that four billion years, from the earliest prkaryotic cells, through the countless couplings and gene combinations, through unfathomable numbers of cytokinesis and mitosis and whatever else living things go through to be living things, if at some point in the mists of the unknowable past so much as an enzyme had gone astray, today you might be a blowfish.

But there you are, as you are. Considering that what you are is the culmination of that long process, seems to me that pointing to any one moment and calling it a "beginning" is a bit arbitrary.

Posted by: maha | June 24, 2006 9:00 AM

#29

The best discussions on Raving Atheist take place not on the front-page blog but in the forums. Many of us do not read RA's blog at all ...

Re conception: Even after fertilization, an egg takes a few days to travel into the womb and implant. At implantation the hormone Human Chorionic Gonadotrophin (hCG) starts to be produced. (It's this hormone that early-pregnancy test kits measure.) The process takes 3-5 days. So, "conception" is no rubicon -- at what point in the 3-5 days does the clump of cells become "human"? The answer is necessarily arbitrary, and in the case of Raving Atheist it is based on magical thinking.

Posted by: Phil | June 24, 2006 9:04 AM

#30

Given the right conditions, it would seem that it is indeed possible to take a skin sample and grow a new body. Biological knowledge advances every day, and I see no reason why the above should not be theoretically possible.

But why should that be a defining issue? It's simply irrelevant. I consider actions that cause harm to the fetus that impact the later life (smoking, drinking, and so on during pregnancy) to be harms to the person, but if the fetus is going to be aborted, I really don't care.

Biology forces an unequal burden upon women when it comes to the gestation of children. Until we manage to build safe and effective uterine replicators, we're stuck with that. As far as I'm concerned, women who will be carrying a pregnancy to term do necessarily give up some of their rights because their actions necessarily affect another body than their own. People are not obligated to take care of themselves (with only the rarest of exceptions), but they *are* obligated to care for their children within specific bounds. When the two princples conflict, the active principle overrides the passive one; thus, women have a responsibility not to (for example) induce Fetal Alcohol Syndrome even though they normally have the right to trash their bodies with alcohol as much as they like.

(If, as some research suggests, behaviors such as drug use can cause harmful changes to men's sperm that affect fetal development, these principles apply to men as well.)

But even I don't think that the fetus has any rights in itself. If it is the woman's intention to carry the fetus to term, then and only then can the needs of the future person be factored into the equation. If the woman doesn't wish to carry it, it's simply a small collection of cells -- genetically unique, yes, but so are cancers. The cells do not have the properties that I consider worth protecting. They represent neither a successful attempt at reproduction (as newborns are) nor thinking beings in their own right (as two-year-olds are).

In short, people who insist that collections of cells be protected because they could hypothetically one day gain the properties that we feel are worth protecting are making a category error with regard to future probabilities. That simply is not a useful way to deal with things that might happen -- the ability to possibly meet a set of criteria is not equivalent to actually meeting those criteria.

Posted by: Caledonian | June 24, 2006 9:08 AM

#31

maha wrote: "So if ten days later the product of conception divide into twins, when did THEY begin? Or does that amount to an existential reboot?"

They began at concpetion as well. Where else did they come from? If it were not for conception they would not be in existence...

I think some of the arguments here are missing the point: it doesn't matter if "life" itself began billions of years ago through some kind of chemical process. What is being discussed is when a developing human being (or even twins) deserves the right to "personhood" (in which that developing human can no longer be legally killed). Many pro-choice arguments mention natural phenomena (spontaneous abortions, for example), but what is at issue is the intentional ending of life committed by mankind.

Given that the abortion argument comes down to whether we humans should be ending the life cycle of developing humans, I think the primary question is when does a developing human acquire the right of "personhood." At the first sign of brain waves? At conception? At birth? This is the question, I believe, that we struggle with.

Posted by: HumanistFireman | June 24, 2006 9:11 AM

#32

But you cannot take a piece of your skin and put it into a woman's womb and expect a human being to develop.

But you can, pretty much... or soon you will be able to.

That's how Dolly the sheep was created. You take a nucleus from a skin cell, put it in a denucleated egg, zap it to jump-start it into activity, and you have a clone.

There are billions of nuclei in your body that could develop into human beings. And like a fertilized egg, they already have the genetic "blueprint" in the same sense that a fertilized egg does---the full "unique" complement of chromosomes that "specifies" a particular human being. They all have the same blueprint, but then so other clones like identical twins, triplets, etc.

Are twins any less persons because they're not genetically unique? No. Combinations of chromosomes are not people.

If discarding a fertilized egg is homicide, why isn't scraping off a skin cell homicide?

I don't think it makes sense to say that "human life" in the moral sense begins at conception. A fertilized egg, which could develop into a person is no more a person than a skin cell, which could likewise develop into a person under the right circumstances.

Or if it is somehow a person, that needs some very serious explaining.

A fertilized egg is mostly a blueprint, or something rather less than a blueprint. ("Blueprint" sounds like a precise specification; genetics and development are much weirder than that.) It's more like rough floorplan sketch, in a sense.

A blueprint or floorplan sketch is not a building, much less a person.

Suppose I have a random floorplan generator, and can push a button to generate a new floorplan for a building, by randomly combining 23 elements from a menu of 23 binary choices.

If I push the button and generate one of the 2**23 combinations, and print it out on a sheet of paper so that it's "real," have I built a house? I don't think so. I think I've generated a random floorplan sketch, not a building.

And there's nothing special about that particular floorplan sketch---or rather, nothing more special than the next one I might get by pushing the button again.

Maybe each random combination of 23 pieces has its own unique specialness, and in some sense that's probably true, but on average there's nothing morally special using about a randomly-generated floorplan sketch that I have in hand, vs. discarding it, pushing the button again, and building that house. The floorplan sketch in hand is not more deserving of being used to guide construction than the next one I might generate, just because I've already generated it. (If I decide to burn the sketch, that's not arson.)

I concede that a fertilized egg is "a human being" in some uninteresting sense. It's a particular one-celled organism, of the human species, but one-celled organisms are not persons. Yes, it has the ability to develop into a human person with a particular combination of chromosomes---as most unicellular organisms don't---but so what? There are zillions of already-combined sets of chromosomes hanging out in the cells of our bodies that could develop into people, too.

And each is just as deserving of a full human life as a fertilized egg.

If a woman is morally obligated to gestate such a unicellular organism because of its precious chromome combination, why is she NOT likewise obligated to save her other cells, plop their nuclei into denucleated eggs, and gestate those, too? She's typically got a zillion spare eggs lying around, so why not create that many clones, anyhow, rather than "aborting" all those poor defenseless cells by failing to use them for cloning?

Posted by: Paul W. | June 24, 2006 9:12 AM

#33

Here's another argument:

Basically, outlawing abortion means that right of the fetus to live trumps the right of the pregnant woman to have a say in what happens to her body. By that logic, not only should organ donation be mandatory, but living organ donation as well. Everyone should be tissue typed for possible matches to people needing liver, bone marrow, or kidney transplants and forced to provide if a match is found, because the right of the sick person needing it to live trumps that of another person who would just suffer a short inconvenience to his/her body. Same argument.

Posted by: Carlie | June 24, 2006 9:18 AM

#34

Precisely, Carlie. We must distinguish between moral/ethical obligations and legal ones.

I would say that everyone has an ethical obligation to donate useful organs when they die in order to help others, but no one has the right to force others to make that choice, whether they are part of the legal system or not.

The legal system permits us to do many things that we really have obligations not to do, and it does not force us to do many things that we really have an obligation to do. That is precisely how things should be.

Posted by: Caledonian | June 24, 2006 9:27 AM

#35

HumanistFireman writes, "Mr. Spedding (above) and even the RA make some good points. A human being begin at conception. A sperm or an egg alone will not develop into a human being."

Does that mean a selected egg and sperm, put together in vitro, the sperm ready to fertilize the egg, is a human being? At what point does a human being begin using nuclear cell transfer? If biologists develop a technology for creating an embryo by adding chromosomes, one at a time, to a denucleated egg, are you going to say a person pops into being when there are 46 there?

"A fertilized egg, barring a natural abortion or a man-made one, will."

As has been pointed out repeated, about half of all oocytes fail to implant in the womb. Naturally. That's not an abortion, which is what happens after an implanted zygote is somehow removed or ejected. An egg fertilized in vitro certainly won't develop into a person, barring considerable more coaxing.

The folks here who are defending the pro-life views are reifying the same things the religious right does: the distinction between natural and artificial, genetic identity in one biological package, what happens if things are "left alone," ignoring the fact that they weren't left alone to get to where they were, and most of all, the pretense that making a definition somehow changes the nature of what is discussed, rather than just the way people talk about it.

Posted by: Russell | June 24, 2006 10:04 AM

#36

I say it isn't a person 'til I can have a conversation with it, but that's just me. Anyway, yes, RA has been pretty useless lately.

Posted by: The Amazing Kim | June 24, 2006 10:19 AM

#37

The problem with the "everyone should be obliged to donate organs" idea is that I do not have the same obligation to a random stranger as I do to my own child. If we take as a given that it is a person as of the moment of conception and this person's right to live outdoes their parents' right to bodily autonomy, then this should be true indefinitely. In particular, parents should be legally obliged to give blood, or donate organs, or donate marrow, or anything, regardless of the personal risk to themselves. But somehow, no one is pushing for that, either.

Posted by: wolfa | June 24, 2006 10:32 AM

#38

Defining a thing as human does not make it a human being

For example? I've got some mathematical background where definitions are important.

Posted by: NatureSelectedMe

Corporations are legally defined as "persons".

The only liberal stance on that point is... Do we really have to decide? It's so hard. We might hurt someone's feelings.

Posted by: NatureSelectedMe

I have no problem hurting someone's feelings. Trust me on that.

An architectural blueprint does not describe a structure atom-by-atom nor does it encode a complete history of the building from construction to demolition. But without it, the particular building it specifies would not exist.
Posted by: Ian H Spedding

Cancer also contains all of those "blueprints". The "blueprints" are immaterial to the discussion, IMO.

If that life has value - is entltled to basic rights - at some stages of its existence, why not at all?
Posted by: Ian H Spedding

Why are they entitled to rights? Such rights as we recognize as "basic" or "inalienable" are confered by mutual agreement, not magically zapped to us. The existance of the death penalty demonstrates that "life" is not a "basic right" in those countries that allow it to exist.

Cancer has no rights.
A pre-omlet chicken has no rights.
A tree has no rights.

We have not agreed to endow them with any.

To be brutally logical about this.. only a moral agent should have any claim to rights, because only a moral agent can reciprocate. A blastocyst is not a moral agent. A corporation is not a moral agent (and yes, I think that they should be stripped of any rights relating to "personhood"). On the other hand, there are other mammals that show all signs of being moral agents, and I would glady extend rights to them.

Posted by: Graculus | June 24, 2006 10:34 AM

#39

They began at concpetion as well.

You should have read the rest of my comment. My argument is that "beginning" is an artificial, cognitive construct that denies much about the nature of life, reproduction, "self," and even "beingness."

Posted by: maha | June 24, 2006 10:40 AM

#40

Given that the abortion argument comes down to whether we humans should be ending the life cycle of developing humans, I think the primary question is when does a developing human acquire the right of "personhood." At the first sign of brain waves? At conception? At birth? This is the question, I believe, that we struggle with.

Yes, and that's a question that cannot be answered scientifically, but socially and legally. Any answer to that question will be arbitrary. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing; a great deal of what we consider to be "reality" is a social construct.

Posted by: maha | June 24, 2006 10:45 AM

#41

Ian H Spedding employs the argumentum ad Tralfamadore:

That depends on how seriously you take the physical concept of "timescape". If the past and the future are as real as the present then the difference between "potential" and "actual" is simply a matter of temporal perspective.

In such a timescape, the pregnancy always was, always is, and always will be terminated. Choice is a null concept.

And so it goes...

Posted by: Ken Cope | June 24, 2006 11:09 AM

#42

There is a basic principle at stake: the right to integrity of the person. It is a basic principle that other people don't get to use my body without my consent, not even to save their lives. So it doesn't matter if the fetus is a legal person; a human being; or merely a potential that requires time, effort, and materials to become an actual person. I still have the right to refuse to have my body used as another's life support.

And late abortion is not an issue except in anti-choice rhetoric. A woman who wants an abortion wants it yesterday. Late abortions result from barriers against abortion or from medical diagnoses about the health or viability of the fetus or about the health or life of the mother.

Posted by: Monado | June 24, 2006 12:03 PM

#43

maha wrote: "So if ten days later the product of conception divide into twins, when did THEY begin? Or does that amount to an existential reboot?"

HumanistFireman wrote: "They began at concpetion as well. Where else did they come from? If it were not for conception they would not be in existence..."

Gotta love a circular definition.

There is no biological seriousness to this argument at all. At the moment of conception, there was one fertilized egg cell, not two. That's the point maha is aiming at.

The "life begins at conception" argument is predicated on some notion that "a soul" is inserted into a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Personally, I disagree with that attribution. If you want to be scientifically serious about this question, you need to say what a "soul" is and how it gets into the fertilized egg. Maha's point illustrates the ridiculousness of this line of argument. If "a soul" arrives at the moment of conception, then the explanation for twins who form after conception would either have to be "a second soul" arrives at the point of division or "two souls" actually arrived at conception.

Given that the pre-split egg is identical in all respects to an egg that does not split, that would seem to rule out the second explanation. And the former explanation seems entirely jury-rigged. At some point we have to concede that this line of argumentation is desperately grasping for straws from thin air.

NatureSelectedMe said:
"You slay me with your moral high ground crap. You have no morals if you leave defining a human as arbitrary and ambiguous."

Whether an entity is an independent "human being" or not is not a fit subject for "definition", but for "recognition". There is need for terms to be defined when laws are written, but that is a different matter than the development of a moral sense.

The fundamental flaw of fundamentalism is that it fixes itself to a finite list of rules and laws, and then collapses into panic mode whenever the reality of our existence becomes more complicated than the simple rules. Given that many of these laws and norms are millenia old, it should hardly come as a surprise that they fail to adequately understand life as we currently understand it. A person of true faith would be humbled by this realization, by dogmatic fundamentalists take the opposite approach, retreating from reality into self-absorbed anger.

You claim to have some background in mathematics. If so, then you are surely familiar with Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, the most profound result in logic in the 20th century. For the uninitiated, the Incompleteness Theorem says (something like) no finite set of axioms can completely capture the notion of truth.

The problem with "defining human" is that we are trying to match the definition with a physical reality, rather than trying to force physical reality to match are tiny set of axioms. Insisting on the "an independent human life begins at conception" axiom has absolutely no support in the physical world. Moreover, the traditional law codes do not even require this kind of stringent rule. Indeed, this interpretation is nearly impossible to maintain.

The questions surround abortion do not merely treat with the question of whether a fertilized egg has a "right to live", but also with the question whether the state should compel a woman to serve as the host to that fertilized egg. The answer to that question would be fairly obvious, when phrased in a non-traditional way. Indeed, if a person who ran a fertility clinic went around forcibly implanting embryos willy-nilly in women who had indicated no desire to get pregnant, his actions would be viewed as horrific. Only the most ardent pro-lifer would then require the pregnant woman to carry the fetus to term.

Generally speaking, the problem then appears to not be the requirement that every fertilized egg must be brought to term by some woman, but rather that a woman who has intercourse has somehow forfeited her right to not be pregnant. Pro-choicers deny that proposition.

Seinfeld had a wonderful episode where this issue was debated in the context of a pizzeria. Is it a pizza when it goes into the oven, or when it comes out? Does it happen when the sauce is put on, or the cheese? Or is twirling dough in the air the decisive moment?

From my standpoint, militantly arguing that "a life" begins at conception makes as much sense as militantly arguing that "a pizza" begins at the moment a pie is put in an oven.

Posted by: RickD | June 24, 2006 12:10 PM

#44

I just want society to keep their grubby little hands off my body. Is that so much to ask?

Posted by: Nymphalidae | June 24, 2006 12:22 PM

#45

PZ writes: "Amanda notes that most opposition to abortion comes from either religious convictions, a commitment to a sexist social order, or I'd add, a rather primitive and unthinking desire to tightly control reproduction in potential mates and kin."

I would add to that, in the case of irreligious opponents to abortion rights, a rejection of the philosophy of Pragmatism. An awful lot of the wankage over fertilization as the magic point in the development of human individuals, particularly with the folks not motivated by religious convictions on the subject, is just a stubborn refusal to accept an argument from pragmatism.

Posted by: s9 | June 24, 2006 12:24 PM

#46

Carlie: Basically, outlawing abortion means that right of the fetus to live trumps the right of the pregnant woman to have a say in what happens to her body.

And that's bad, why? How about at 35 weeks? Your argument that fetus = kidney is not very good. One point is that a fetus is not part of a woman's body because of different DNA. Although, there are human chimeras that may have kidneys with different DNA.

Posted by: NatureSelectedMe | June 24, 2006 12:27 PM

#47

So has RA actually advocated making abortion illegal, or does he just find it unethical?

Obviously, if the latter, he is receiving much undo criticism.

Posted by: sdanielmorgan | June 24, 2006 12:31 PM

#48

Though, I should note that I have never encountered an atheist opponent of abortion rights that I knew to be a female. It's just that most of the atheist opponents of abortion I have encountered were all crazy American anarcho-libertarians, and their rejection of Pragmatism seemed to be a motivating factor in much of their thinking.

Posted by: s9 | June 24, 2006 12:35 PM

#49

Nature says:

"So you want to leave defining a person arbitrary. Shouldn't there be some hard and fast definition?"

Many demarcations are simply hard to do, not least in biology. The fact that we have a hard time to define "life", "species", and "personality", doesn't stop me from being a living human person.

But defining "alive" is easier if the above is granted. I'm still confounded when US shows says someone is dead while the heart is momentarily stopped and alive while the brain is irreversibly dead. Why is braindead a poor hard and fast definition? Is it because then an early foetus isn't yet alive? (Note that I don't think that is enough to be a person. It is merely an argument against anti-abortionists.)

"please don't use the anti-choice crowds' double-speak. They are certainly not pro-life in any meaningful sense."

Indeed. They are certainly devaluating life generally since their policies means lower life values (more pain, sickness, handicaps (not a defensible position, perhaps), and powerty) and that a whole lot more 'humans' are killed in natural spontaneous abortions, and women specially since their policies mean women don't own their bodies. Also ironically since it's not a zerosum game in defining "alive" their definitions means more 'dead'. "Anti-life" would be a more meaningful naming.

Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | June 24, 2006 12:36 PM

#50

If the past and the future are as real as the present then the difference between "potential" and "actual" is simply a matter of temporal perspective.

I just have to call attention to this comment, because of how revealing it is - notice that this is only true if you do, in fact, think that there is absolutely no difference between potential and actual.

In real life, of course, they are quite different and even if the past and future are as real as the present (already there I think it's a little confused - what could that possibly mean?) they would still be quite different. All you need to do to catch that is to remember that "Possible but not actual" is a valid description of something.

Also I think it's about time people stopped letting anti-choice advocates use the "once conception happens, barring miscarriage/etc, you get a baby" argument to arrive at the result that conception is something special. This only works if you assume, as an implicit premise, the conclusion. (In other words, the various ways of getting to 'conception is an important moment' are more or less irrelevant - it is a deeply bad argument.)

For example, we could run the same argument as follows:
Sperm are human lives, and should be taken very good care of - A sperm, barring an inability to get laid or being beat out by another sperm, will fertilize an egg and develop into a human being. This makes it conclusively different from testicles, which do not have the moral status of human beings, and very important to boot. People refusing to treat sperm like actual living moral agents are fooling themselves.

Notice that the same argument is being made here as in terms of a fertilized egg: you just pick one particular step in the incredibly complicated and involved procedure that has to take place if someone is to give birth to a viable baby and declare it to be the most specialest part. Then you pretend nothing happened before it (that was important, at any rate), and note that "barring ...(where here you insert a brief hand wave at the amazing number of ways that procedure might not be realized)... you will inevitably have a human being." From this you conclude what you started with: that whatever point you picked is the most importantest point there could be. And from that you conclude that whatever is true of the end result (actual living human being with a certain moral status) must be true of the thing you were pointing to. (This is, of course, equally flawed and stupid as far as points go: of course arguing that if something or other is true of an entity of some sort (say, a person) than it must have always been true of that entity (right up until the already identified magic point) is as invalid a claim as the argument in total.

Finally, RickD, Godel's Incompleteness theorems do not actually say that, in any useful way at least. (And I think, to boot, you meant to refer to Tarski.)

Posted by: Dr. Pretorius | June 24, 2006 12:54 PM

#51

"One point is that a fetus is not part of a woman's body because of different DNA. Although, there are human chimeras that may have kidneys with different DNA."

I think your DNA argument is null and void anyhow. If I yank out an hair with the root containing DNA, did I perform an amputation?

Conversely, do you have the right to say that a transplant or a mechanical heart "is not part of" a body? A foetus is a part of a womans body until it is developed enough to make do on its own. It is not a moral or legal right for you to try to have a womans foetus removed any more than original organs or transplants. It is entirely the persons decision.

On another note, I liked the pizza analogy. One of the problems with defining the start and end of life is that it is processes, not especial moments or things. Even the concept of braindeath means that there is still living cells in the body.

Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | June 24, 2006 12:56 PM

#52

Great, then all anti-choice advocates are invited to adopt a blastocyst/zygote/fetus. Obviously if it isn't part of a woman's body it is viable outside of her body, right?

Posted by: Graculus | June 24, 2006 1:02 PM

#53

And that's bad, why? How about at 35 weeks? Your argument that fetus = kidney is not very good. One point is that a fetus is not part of a woman's body because of different DNA. Although, there are human chimeras that may have kidneys with different DNA.

A woman has as much DNA in common with an unfertilized egg as with a fertilized one. Does this mean that an unfertilized egg is not a part of a woman's body? I would say no, and instead would say that, as others have pointed out, DNA alone does not an individual make. The extensive connections between the fetus and the mother are what make the fetus a part of the mother until birth.

That being said, I agree that birth is not a particularly good time for when abortion becomes illegal, with some exceptions. But it is not, for me, a matter of personhood. It is a matter of when does the fetus's right to exist overrule the mother's right to self determination.

In the case of the mother's health (even if health is not a particularly well defined term) the "dividing line" probably should be birth. Likewise for severe birth defects. Otherwise, I think that "viability" (also a poorly defined term) is probably the best place to draw the line because that is when the fetus actually could live as an independent being, as opposed to being dependent on the connections with the body of the mother. A newly fertilized egg is purely potential. A 35 week fetus actually could be a separate individual right then and there.

Posted by: Jethro Gulner | June 24, 2006 1:13 PM

#54

PZ, you read my mind - I've been wondering for a while when RA was going to convert to Christianity. His pledge to never again criticize Christianity for any reason is a huge step in that direction, but I think the seeds of that eventual conversion were laid right from the beginning with his anti-choice stance. As I wrote, though in a different context:

When believers are not taught how to reason logically or critically analyze evidence, one delusion will look as good as another... When a religious meme enters the mind through the loophole created by a lack of critical thinking skills, it naturally tries to seal that gap behind itself so that no other can enter the same way and oust it... But that gap can never be entirely closed. There is always the possibility that another meme will gain entrance the same way, and that is what we are now seeing.

That was actually a review of The Da Vinci Code, but it strikes me as quite appropriate to RA's situation. When you suspend critical thinking and allow even one irrational idea to take roost in your brain, it makes it much easier for others to follow.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that being anti-abortion is intrinsically an irrational position. I'm sure a reasoned argument could be made for it, although I think the pro-choice arguments are better. But what really gets me about RA is that it seems like he's not even trying to defend that belief rationally. His arguments offered in defense of it are some of the most poorly thought-out ones I've ever seen. It's like the religious anti-abortion stance without the religion, and if that seems contradictory and vacuous, well, so does his position.

Posted by: Ebonmuse | June 24, 2006 1:16 PM

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