From October 09, 2004. I'd write it differently today, but the main point still stands.
Life begins, takes its course, and ends.
The course of Life determines the directionality of Time. Without Life, it would be impossible to determine which way the Time goes, what is Past and what is Future.
Every living organism dies, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Life becomes Non-Life.
But, when does Non-Life become Life? This seems to be the key question in the discussions about abortion, stem-cell research, and other touchy political/religious topics.
Usual answers: at the time of fertilization, or 40 days after, or at the time of completion of development of the neural tube, or brain, or heart, or pain receptors, or at the time self-awareness kicks in (humans only), or at birth (or at five months, three weeks, six days and nineteen hours, see the semi-serious satire here). The sheer number of responses, as well as temporal ambiguity of at least half of them, suggests there is something fishy about the answers, or the question.
The trouble is with our notion that Life comes from Non-Life over and over again, for each individual separately. Historically, the question was framed as a dispute between epigenetics and preformationism. This history was masterfully outlined in the first half of the influential Gould's "Ontogeny and Philogeny" (book that spawned a whole new and exciting discipline: evo-devo), and the dispute within the preformationist camp between homunculus-in-egg and homunculus-in-sperm beliefs was beautifully rendered in a book by Gould's postdoc, Clara Pinto-Correia in "The Ovary of Eve".
In epigenetics, "parts" of the future embryo are contained in the egg. Fertilization is needed to trigger a process, a "program", that will put the pats together and form a new organism. In preformationism, a tiny little organism is found fully formed within either the egg or the sperm and, upon fertilization, just grows towards its final size.
Epigenetics makes it relatively easy, though not perfect, to think of fertilization as the moment when life begins. It is more difficult for preformationists: fertilization is just a trigger for an already existing person to start growing. You were a little person inside your mother's egg. Eve's ovary contained eggs that contained daughters whose eggs contained daughters whose eggs contained daughters.....whose eggs contained your mother whose eggs contained you. And your eggs contain the Russian doll of all of your descendants, until the Apocalipse. Same logic applies to the sperm version of the story.
This was the debate that raged mainly during 17th through 19th century. Before that, it was not even known that mammals had eggs. The 40-day rule was purely practical - that was the earliest time one could know if one was pregnant.
Fast-forward to the end of 20th century. The common wisdom is that epigenetics won. Instead of parts being already present in the egg, they are produced by action of the genes and the genes also run the "computer program" for putting the parts together. More recent research indicates that some "parts" are already present in the egg, e.g., maternal RNAs, proteins and hormones, but this does not substantively shange the logic of the story.
But if one looks with greater detail into writings of the most influential writers like Dawkins, a different story emerges. This, to me, looks like preformationism. If we are just "lumbering robots" and the mere "vehicles" for our genes, if the genes are what really counts, and genes are existing forever moving from one generation to another - isn't that also a Russian doll metaphor? In the beginning there was a gene, and the gene keeps replicating and travelling through time through a bunch of disposable bodies. That is preformationism.
If one looks closely, both the "program" view of the gene, and the Dawkinsian view of the gene eliminate the time of fertilization as the beginning of Life. Life came from Non-Life about 4 billion years ago. Once. That's it. It is a branching bush with one root and gazillions of twigs. Root stays put, the twigs die. There was only one birth on this planet and googlillions of deaths.
So, why does this notion of "Life Begins at Birth" survive into the 21st century? Because DNA is just a molecule. It is dead. It can sit in a test-tube (or in pretty yellow rocks that owners of "Jurassic Park" can use) forever. So why can't it sit tight inside an egg and wait a while for its time to come? That is how most people in the street think of it. Egg is a computer. Sperm is a floppy-disk. DNA is sofware. Some software is already on the computer, the rest comes on the floppy. Once you put the disk in the computer, the program runs and, voila, here's an embryo. In the meantime, the computer mey not even be plugged in and the disk is collecting dust. But the POTENTIAL is always there. Thus, Life easily begins at the moment of fertilization. Over and over and over again, through the billions of years of the history of the planet. Life arises de novo. Life out of Non-Life. I thought they taught us in school that Louis Pasteur had something to say about this.
As long as the public believes that everything important about us is written in our genes ("program"), or that we are just a gene's way of making more genes ("selfish gene"), the possibility for declaring the time of fertilization as the time life begins will persist.
The alternative, something along the lines of Developmental Systems Theory (see my previous two posts about genes), puts the beginnnig of ALL life, every single organism, back into the primal soup. We are all parts of a very long continuum. One day each one of us will die at our own dates and times, but we were all born simultaneously a long time ago - about 4.5 billion years ago. Thus, killing some sperm, or an egg, or an embryo, or a fetus, or a child, or an adult, or an elderly person (or a cockroach, or a staphilococcus, or a mouse, or a chicken, or a head of cabbage) all amount to the same thing - end of one branch on the tree of life. But the tree itself is fine, thank you, alive and growing and breathing and photosynthetizing, and some pruning of its terminal branches does not hurt it at all. Now, here is a grand perspective if you are looking for one.
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I'm a bit confused by the implications here. Granted, life started once 4 billion years ago and has sprung up like a tree. Now, how do we decide when it is moral to trim its branches? Before the baby is born? Before a sufficient amount of development and exposure to the environment (say 1 month outside the womb)? I would to heavily emphasize that I currently am in favor of maintaining the right to an abortion on pragmatic grounds due of the amount of resources it takes to raise a functioning human being, and the paralyzing effect on civilization that comes with overpopulation, but this is topic is still very unsettling to me as I imagine it is to others.
Thanks
Over 3,500 terminations per day, 1.3 MILLION per year in the United States alone.
50 or 60 MILLION per year World Wide.
I am a pro-lifer who has no religious convictions at all . I didn't need the fear of god or anything else to come to my decision, just a good sence of what is right and wrong.
You see we were all once a fetus. Is it beyond the realm of possibilities that when your mother first learned she was carrying you, she may have considered her options? What if she had decided to terminate? Would that have been OK?
You would not exist, if you have children they would not exist, and your (husband or wife) would be married to someone else. You would have been deprived of all your experiences and memories. In this day and age with terminations being so readily available and so many being carried out, if you make it to full term
you can consider yourself lucky. Lucky you had a mother that made the choice of life for you. Don't you think they all deserve the same basic human right, LIFE?
I'm all for contraception, prevention is certainly better than termination.
Did you know you can get an implant that is safe, 99.9% effective, and lasts for three years? Just think girls not even a show for three years, wouldn't that be great? I think too many people rely too heavily on the last option (abortion), I think if abortions weren't so readily available people would manage their reproductive system far better resulting in a fraction of the number of unwanted pregnancies.
World wide there are over 50 MILLION aborted pregnancies each year. In America 3,500 terminations carried out every day, that's over 1.3 million every year, 50% of all cases claimed that birth control had been used, 48% admitted they took no precaution, and 2% had a medical reason. That's a stagering 98% may have been prevented had an effective birth control been used. Don't get me wrong, I suspect the percentages in Australia would be much the same.
Just a lot of unnessessary killing.
I am convinced that in the not too distant future, people will look back at many of the practices of today with disbelief and horror.
At the point of conception is when life began for you. This was the start of your existance. Your own personal big bang. Three weeks after conception heart started to beat. First brain waves recorded at six weeks after conception. Seen sucking thumb at seven weeks after conception.
ausblog
wow.
I am a pro-lifer who has no religious convictions at all . I didn't need the fear of god or anything else to come to my decision, just a good sence of what is right and wrong.
You see we were all once a fetus. Is it beyond the realm of possibilities that when your mother first learned she was carrying you, she may have considered her options? What if she had decided to terminate? Would that have been OK?
This is just an appeal to the emotions and as such will only reinforce people already ingrained with your belief.
You would not exist, if you have children they would not exist, and your (husband or wife) would be married to someone else. You would have been deprived of all your experiences and memories.
I would not be deprived of anything if I did not exist.
Now that I reread this post, I am baffled that you are blaming Dawkins for the belief that all that is important about us is in our genes:
As long as the public believes that everything important about us is written in our genes ("program"), or that we are just a gene's way of making more genes ("selfish gene"), the possibility for declaring the time of fertilization as the time life begins will persist.
Since when does the public believe this? Since when has it been demonstrated that people who believe this tend to be more "pro-life" than people who do not?
Thanks
DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN GET AN IMPLANT (in arm) THAT IS - SAFE - 99.9% EFFECTIVE AND LASTS FOR THREE YEARS?
Have you checked out (abortionclinnicdays)-the reality show.
If you understand will you help me spread my message
It is impossible to arrive at the anti-choice position via scientific information about human reproduction.
For the religious, their position comes from the church. For the non-religious and relgiious alike, anti-choice stance is a thinly-veiled mysoginy.
What I argue in my post is that reification (or deification) of genes, replacing God with DNA, allows the non-religious to construct the anti-choice smokescreen for their femiphobia.
I've mentioned this a lot on the scienceblogs lately, and at my site in various posts at our blog.
I think it is the single most important argument to make in terms of validating the moral and ethical legitimacy of stem cell research. That the argument is not about whether or not you are ending life, but whether or not we really should care. Since killing sperm, eggs, cancer cells, organ donors, etc., all are various forms of killing human life (but ones we don't seem to mind) then what is the difference between the egg and sperm and their combination? Clearly, the only answer is that of the magical belief of ensoulment at the event, otherwise there is nothing magical about this moment.
Science should not be regulated based on this magical belief about life beginning at conception, which in reality is based on misconceptions about how fertilization occurs from several hundred years ago before they understood genetics itself. Now we do understand and should defy this desire to make science bow to a fundamentally theologic and unscientific belief in life beginning, when it is clear, this does not happen.
I think your argument is misguided. From a practical perspective, while there may be some--even many--people who conceive of genes as "little people programs," these are not people who are functioning at the level of policy and theory. Moveover, the ones who think of little people programs are not going to accept arguments that fall too far afield of their apparent experience or that denigrate the meaning they find in their lives.
From a theoretical perspective, I am not well-versed in Developmental Systems Theory, but I don't believe it denies the existence of the individual, just the existence of finite measurable packets in evolution. Indeed, individuation is a necessity for DST to be coherent. While species development may not occur purely by accidental genetic inheritance, development per se still clusters.
Law and ethics do not rely on theories of metaphysical or physical predestination or inviolability, they rely on the perception of self and the compulsion for self-preservation. Therefore, unless you could prove that the absence of teleology has prescriptive moral force, you will never find a thing science has to say that is relevant to the court and agora, except in an instrumental sense.
If you think the point of conception is NOT when life begins, and all you have is a clump of cells and not a living human being.
Then at least concider this -
Soon after you were conceived you were no more than a clump of cells.
This clump of cells was you at your earliest stage, you had plenty of growing to do but this clump of cells was you none the less. Think about it.
Aren't you glad you were left unhindered to develope further.
Safe inside your mother's womb until you were born.
I could not have cared less because I would never have known. And I will not have any idea about it after I die, either. I am not a coward.