And I pwned Ed on human-life-at-conception.

okfine, no prob.
The evolution of cooperation and promotion of consaguinous kin, and the instantiation of incest taboos and social mores preceeded the emergence of monotheistic religions by hundreds of thousands of years.
And btw, the United States of America was a slave-holder nation founded by slave-owners for two centuries.
Theres your freedom and justice for you.

Science is the record of dead religions.

strangelet on March 31, 2009 at 12:12 PM

I didn’t ask you to prove to me that you can read a passage from some liberal history book, nor did I ask you to prove to me that you’re a moron that can’t write in plain English. You expect someone to take you seriously as an intelligent being, yet you refuse to respect the elegance of the language by spouting off some crap you read out of a book, making a post with typos and language shortcuts used by prepubescent little girls? Yeah, right. Your mind is as empty as your purpose in life.

When I say prove me wrong, I’m speaking in regards to your moral relativism. Prove to me that you’re not a coward that turns a blind eye to escape self-accountability. Prove to me that you don’t live in a moral grey area. But most of all, prove that you have a purpose in this world other than taking up valuable air and consuming valuable resources that an individual with individual liberties that believes in individual justice could be putting to better use.

Oh and by the way, The United States of America was formed on July 4, 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. Slavery was abolished in the United States in 1863. By my math that’s 87 years, not 200, as you claim.

You expect people to take you serious when you can’t perform simple math problems in regards to key dates in American history? You expect people to take you serious when you can’t so much as formulate a proper sentence? Really?

I think Ed got served.

strangelet on March 31, 2009 at 12:15 PM

That’s rich. Ed got served by an illiterate moron that can’t do basic math. Cute.

Prove me wrong.

leetpriest on March 31, 2009 at 11:58 AM

okfine, no prob.
The evolution of cooperation and promotion of consaguinous kin, and the instantiation of incest taboos and social mores preceeded the emergence of monotheistic religions by hundreds of thousands of years.
And btw, the United States of America was a slave-holder nation founded by slave-owners for two centuries.
Theres your freedom and justice for you.

Science is the record of dead religions.

Ed: did he mean theological conservative or political conservative? The two are not always equal.

jediwebdude on March 31, 2009 at 10:53 AM

Actually, yes they are. The two are are one in the same, some just refuse to realize it. Without theological standards, political standards cannot logically exist. Without some form of theological standard, there does not exist an advent of freedom or liberty, thus conservatism need not exist. Moral relativism is the ultimate problem, and cause of why we have so many stupid pointless discussions where people like the Monster and Strangelet and Allahpundit fail to understand basic points about human life, and wrong vs. right. These two live in a moral gray area 100% of the time using fallacious logic to control their actions and deeds while they hopelessly reach for some idiotic reason to retain some basic form of ethics.

Example: According to the declaration which provided our independent nation, everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Without God present, I could easily deny you your right to life simply because I felt like doing so at the time without fear of justice (without a God, justice is a fallacy, as there is no standard by which justice can be measured).

By what standard does anyone consider denying someone a life purely to prolong another person’s life right? Does this now mean that I can murder someone in order to gain a business or political achievement? If not, why not?

Strangelet, Allahpundit, and the Monster live in a moral grey area because they’re cowards, and are afraid to abide by a standard. Like most people in this screwed up, twisted, sick hellhole of a world, they have trained themselves to refuse the ability to define what’s wrong and what’s right so that they can escape the discomfort of being accountable to themselves.

Prove me wrong.

Why do you get everybody’s panties in a wad over Doug Kmiec?
You are giving Kmiec some kind of intellectual legitimacy by engaging in his completely invalid debate points without pointing out the truth in a loud and clear voice:

DOUG KMIEC IS A SELF-SERVING FRAUD.

Kmiec deliberately tries to sucker fair-minded folks into endlessly more complicated arguments in order to lead them away from the ugly truth about Kmiec himself. Kmiec is just playing with you.

Kmiec has abandoned Catholicism and he knows it. And he’s proud of it. He is using these debates to gain more cred with the Obama administration, and his goal is to become one of the inner circle. He is using the Catholic Church as his footstool.

Hawthorne on March 31, 2009 at 6:48 AM

Ed’s preconditions for “human life” are diploid (fertilized) oocyte and “alive”.
A teratoma is diploid and “alive”, at least as long its on the life support support system of the uterus.
A parthenogen can be haploid…..so it fails Ed’s definition of human life.
My proposal is to use parthenogens for hESCR since by Ed’s definition they are not “human life”. We can start parthenogens invitro and harvest them as blastomeres.
kk?

An appendix has no potential to become a human life through natural processes. Neither does parthenogenic reproduction. Neither the appendix or an ovum can produce life in a natural process. You may be able to create complete human from cloning methods practiced on the cells of an appendix. You may be able to produce a blastomere through laboratory procedures with ova. But neither of those processes can occur in nature in human beings.

This is what makes your comparison apples and oranges. What we are discussing here is trying to determine when the beginning of human life takes place in the context of allowing termination of said life. I cannot think of a real logical explanation why we would terminate a cloning or parthenogenic reproduction, other than health concerns. Why would you bother to go through all that trouble to create a life which you are about to destroy? So if you are willing to establish that standard, I am perfectly content to accept that as the standard for naturally conceived zygotes as well. No termination except in cases of health risks.

So now can we get back to the INTENDED context of the discussion without all the purposeful misdirection?

That’s as absurd as saying that identical twins have no human rights because they’re not unique from each other. I’m using the word “unique” to distinguish the blastomere from its mother, to distinguish it from an appendix in your silly construct.

So having “unique” genes means exactly what? The identical twins aren’t unique, but we agree they’re two lives. The chimera has cells with different chromosomes in different parts of its body, but is only one life. Clearly, the uniqueness of the DNA is not what makes “a human life”.

My “silly construct” is designed to demonstrate the absurdity of your definition. You recognize the silliness of calling an appendix a human life, saying that identical twins are only one human life, or calling a chimera two human lives. What you won’t get through your head is that these silly things are direct logical consequences of your choice of DNA uniqueness as somehow relevant to the question of when “a human life” begins. The silliness is inherent in the DNA argument itself. I just showed you where it lead.

We all know that identical twins are two separate human lives, a chimera is one human life, and an appendix is zero human lives. So, what is it about these three cases that allows us to easily distinguish them from one another? It isn’t DNA differences. So what is it?

Lol! It is the conservative party that is currently devolving into fundamentalist tribalism, complete with excommunication of defectors and magical thinking.
Examples of conservative magical thinking–
Polls lie.
hASCR is “superior” to hESCR.
The Econopalypse was caused by Dems abusing Frannie and Freddie.
“Victory” in Iraq.
Centerright nation.
An eight-cell blastulae is a “human life”.

By your fertilization argument parthenogens are not “human life”, since they are not fertilized, and teratomas are.
Since parthenogens are not “human life”, why then, let use parthenogens to restart the 21 unstable cell lines that dimwitted evangelical bumbler Bush authorized research funding for!
lol

Ask a biologist if an organism can initiate mitosis without being alive. I suspect you’ll get a short, and very clarifying, response.

Your arguments are so illogical it baffles me, let’s start with the appendix one. You don’t remove your appendix because it is inconvenient

Why someone would or would not choose to remove an appendix or embryo has no bearing on whether it represents “a unique human life”, which was Ed’s reasoning.

He’s the one who claims that fertilization is so important, and that implantation does not matter. Then when we talk about twinning, he says that the twins are two separate lives, even though they aren’t “a unique human life” by his own definition. Clearly, there is something else that happens beyond fertilization to make two lives out of one.

But it can’t simply be the physical separation of the undifferentiated cells into separate masses, or the removal of an appendix would cause two unique human lives to exist where only one was before. What is different about separating that mass of cells and removing an appendix? We know that there is something different, but we’re talking about definitions here. Define that difference. There’s something the appendix doesn’t have, that the rest of the body after it’s removed, and the identical twins, each have.

Once a cell starts reproducing through mitosis, it’s alive. If it happens to split into twins, then both of them are alive, too. If it happens to split into quadruplets, then all four of them are alive, too. You’ve tried confusing the issue with what happens after human life begins. An embryo can develop spinal bifida, too, but that doesn’t make it not alive.

But those twins or quads can’t be “a unique human life“, according to your definition. You’re the one who said that the unique combination of DNA is what makes the fertilized egg “a unique human life“.

What if a few cells split off during the first few rounds of post-fertilization division, but they don’t ever implant in the uterine wall, is each one a unique human life? You originally said that the fertilization itself makes “a unique human life” regardless of whether it implants or not. What are the criteria for being “a unique human life” when the mass of cells undergoes fission?

Are a sperm and egg? Are they some other species? Of course we know that they are alive, and they are human. That makes them “human life”. They are also different subsets of DNA of the humans they came from, so your “a unique human life” would seem to apply.

My appendix is “human life”, because it’s still in my body receiving nutrition and oxygen via my bloodstream, and it’s every bit as unique compared to the rest of my body as identical twins are compared to each other. But no one considers it “taking a life” if it’s ever removed from my body. And no one I know considers it “taking a life” when a live human egg cell happens not to be fertilized by a live human sperm. (I can’t speak for the “every sperm is sacred” crowd.)

What “begins” at fertilization is a particular combination of chromosomes. And even that isn’t the only time it can happen. As cells divide, sometimes chromosomes twist around each other and transfer a piece of DNA from one to another, etc. That not all of the cells in a body have exactly the same DNA doesn’t make it more than one life any more than a chimera formed from multiple fertilizations is.

Your arguments are so illogical it baffles me, let’s start with the appendix one. You don’t remove your appendix because it is inconvenient but because it is threatening your life and yes, the cells int it will die because they depend on the organism to survive which -if you think about it- makes abortion even worse than homicide, because you are removing a life that depends on you. Another great difference with the appendix: The inside of the uterus is a totally independent environment from the rest of the mother’s body; the reason? If it were not so, the embryo would be destroyed as “foreign” by the mother’s immune system thus proving that it is not the same or the “woman’s body”. You keep bringing how any cell with DNA would fit Ed’s definition of life, I have already told you how that is not true with the two examples above, but one more point: If we are to hold your point, then no life has value because after all, we are a bunch of cells that somehow are stuck together. While you willfully ignore the fact that in the blastomere, all the DNA code necessary to make you who and what you are is present already and from that all the different organs that make an entire organism evolve into the different structures. I would like to see you try and make an organism from a discarded appendix or skin cell, go ahead try it, and don’t tell me that’s what cloning is, because it is not, cloning means you introduce a whole organism’s DNA into a cell which is what happens at the moment of conception, not a skin cell multiplying until developing into a human being.

That’s a political and ethical question. Kmiec wanted to know when life begins, and the answer is scientifically obvious. My answer to you is that I believe “personhood” begins at life, and that human life should be protected throughout its existence, as it has a higher value than just its practical use at any stage of existence.

Ed Morrissey on March 30, 2009 at 6:18 PM

Fair point. It is an individual human organism from the point of conception, and clearly alive.

It seems like the political process in the U.S. is struggling with the issue with the tools it has. Sure Roe can be seen as a power grab by SCOTUS but the states with the large majority of the population would likely not restrict abortion access if Roe were overturned.