Posts by Peter Ashby
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But things that have been through the science process are surely things that we 'believe' to be true, based on scientific testing, observation, review etc. Scientists often seem to use the phrase 'as far as we know'.
When a scientist says 'as far as we know' the 'we' in that sentence is all humanity. They are stating the limits of human knowledge at that point of time. You see to become a scientist the learning vast amounts of stuff is just the necessary gruntwork. The peak of the mountain, the ultimate goal is true ignorance, to arrive at the place where the answer to the question is: we do not know. At that point you can roll up your sleeves and get to work. Some of course toil a few steps back jumping up and down on some squidgy bits of the mountain testing how firm they really are.
None of that is about belief, it is about knowing. Knowledge and belief are not the same things. I know that quartz is made of silicon and oxygen, I fail to believe crystals of it have paranormal powers.
My belief is that the scientific method is the best route we have to verifiable, firm, bounded knowledge. That belief is tested and confirmed regularly.
Like
here where over 20 years they have sampled mutations to every base in the bacterial genome and witnessed evolution in action.Comparing that to 'beliefs' just conflates far, far too much to be tenable.
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And speaking as someone who has a history of severe depression, what exactly do you mean by 'consent'? Not quite as clear a line as you'd like to think, chum.
which by no means precludes other people in other circumstances being so competent. IOW your moral objection and 'yuck' factor should not be used to stop other people from deciding that enough is enough.
You are welcome to your p.o.v. and good for you for still being here. But please let others be free to make different choices huh?
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Susan Snowdon we all have our own viewpoints/specialities. I would not presume to speak for you as a woman on the choice issue, I merely wish you to be free to make it for yourself. I pick apart positions based on fact because that is what I can do and contribute. It should indeed be your choice and yours only*, but unfortunately we do not live in a perfect world and the fight goes on, we all fight it in our own way.
*I would hope you would have a supportive partner too, but unfortunately that is not always possible. Which highlights much of the problem with the 'pro-life' brigade, they want the world to be perfect and refuse to have to deal with the compromises and least worst decisions the real world has to make.
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Grant Dexter:
When I say "at conception" that is a layman's term to acknowledge conception as the first instance of a new human's life.
There you go again, using terms like 'instance' that try to make a process an event. You betray yourself with your choice of words, iow your mindset is wrong. Get with reality.
I understand my terminology may not be acceptable in your workplace, but I would hope that my meaning is clear. Would you mind telling me what might be the point of being so pedantic about the process of conception? Are you going to propose legislation based on what you know?
Well firstly your meaning is clear, that is not the problem. The problem is that it is wrong in the sense that it does not describe reality. That is not reality's problem, it is yours.
Secondly, Yes! we should propose legislation based on what 'we' (being humanity) 'know' (being the corpus of science). Which means that your formulation that a 'baby' exists from conception is seen as completely bogus so we move on and find a much better, workable scheme based on knowledge and not emotive weasel words. Got it yet?
And a definition of life is important if we are going to recognise it on Mars or Europa or Enceladus or even here on earth. New Scientist had a bit last week on some enigmatic things found in crystals from acidic and highly saline lakes in Oz where nothing we know of should live. The debate is still going on that one. But the point is that many people are realising, as I hinted wrt rna viruses that the boundary between life and non-life is not hard and fast which is why we cannot define it. Nature has no joint there for us to carve it at.
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James Bremner
I read an article (that I can't find to link to) that stated that current research into fetal pain pegged the 16th week as the time by which the fetus is sufficiently developed to feel pain.
You need to be very careful in this area with fuzzy terms like 'feel'. I'm a mouse guy so my human development is shaky but for this you need several things to be in place:
Pain receptors, not just pain fibres, the terminal receptors must have formed.
The pain fibres terminate in the Spinal Cord and make an afferent connection.*
That connection ultimately makes contact with a neuron in the sensory cortex.
Even then you do not get 'feeling' unless and until the foetus is able to do the perception thing and we are very, very fuzzy about exactly when that happens and 16 weeks seems mighty early to me.*Note that if the connection in the spinal cord forms a reflex arc with a motor neuron you will get a reflex response to stimulation even with no connection to an aware brain. Ditto coordinated movements, remember a headless chook can still run. So reaction to stimulus and movement do not signify sentience.
I know foetuses can perceive in the 3rd trimester, we would sing 'Old MacDonald' to the eldest when in the car. After the youngest was born she would drop instantly to sleep if we sang it. But 16 weeks, no.
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Grant Dexter misunderstood as follows:
I understand conception as a sequence of events that generates a human being. I haven't studied in a lab for endless hours as you have, but I do speak in nothing but facts when I say that at conception a baby is alive and human.
Your statement shows clearly that you have not understood. Try reading what I have written again. I did not ask you to choose amongst events, but *processes*, it is processes all the way down. The cortical reaction for eg is clearly a process since there is a time window within which if another sperm binds before the calcium wave reaches that part of the membrane it too will fertilise the egg resulting in polyspermy and an inviable conceptus/embryo.
You seem to have some graded scale for life which is an interesting thing to have. Why would you need that? I see things and I think, "Rock. =not alive. Tree. =alive."
Then you are unaware of the raging debate in science over the fact that we have been unable to come up with a working, bulletproof definition of life. All the ones we have break down when it comes to the viruses. After all some are no more than naked rna, which is why incidentally we secrete RNAase from our skin. I have isolated and indeed made RNA many times without ill effects so clearly there is something about some RNA sequences that make them viruses while others are harmless. RNA is just a chemical polymer, you can crystalise it, turn it into a rock iow. Still sure you know the boundary between what is alive and what is not? care to share your definition?
You seem to think that calling a baby at conception "alive" equates to believing a virus is "alive". They are both alive, you know? But why would you compare a baby with a virus? A baby isn't a virus, Mr. Smith!
Ah but without viruses you would not have a baby. Not only is there a surge of endogenous retroviral expression post fertilisation but there is good evidence that the mammalian placenta owes it existence to a viral infection. Which is just part of the reason biology views mammalian embryos/foetuses as parasites since that is in fact how they function, even using similar tricks to turn the maternal immune system down so it doesn't cause rejection of the foreign tissue.
But you go on portraying your ignorance, it is most amusing. BTW your ignorance has now been officially upgraded to wilfull. Ignorance is allowed, wilfull ignorance is a terrible crime against the wonderful learning instrument between your ears.
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Grant Dexter further emoted:
Wow. Peter. Lots more words. I'm impressed. I would say that a person forms at some stage between the first meeting of sperm and egg and first cell duplication. I don't know exactly where in that process.
Yet you claim it as a defining point. You cannot have it both ways, either it is a defining point in which case you have to define it, or it isn't.
Still the facts remain that at conception a baby is alive and human.
No the fact remains that at conception you have a conceptus, which is only alive if you use a narrow definition of the term. Put a conceptus in a dish by itself and it will not be alive very long. By your definition a virus is alive, so is a synethesised bacterial genome sitting in TE ph8.2 The concept you are studiously avoiding is the idea of the difference between the potential and the actual. You are conflating the two and you cannot do that. By your rubric the barely outlined novel in my head is already a best seller. Where are my royalties dammit?
Your continued conflation of actual babies with potential conceptuses is merely showing you up to being both blinkered and ignorant. I am trying to educate you, by all means change that to blinkered and wilfully ignorant...
BTW I have a PhD and many years lab experience in Developmental Biology including the making of transgenic mice by injecting dna constructs into the pronuclei of newly fertilised mouse eggs. It is a race to get them all done before that stage where the pronuclei membranes break down. You have to beware of eggs with three pronuclei, ones where the cortical reaction wasn't fast enough and two sperm bound and inserted their loads. Just one potentially fatal hurdle that emphasise strongly how very potential such things are.
You see I know, intimately what a conceptus looks like and it ain't like any baby I have ever seen unless it's some sort of microplankton. Blastocysts, the stage where you get Embryonic stem cells and the latest they can be cultured look like transparent footballs with a puddle in the bottom. They are exactly the same size as conceptuses, approx 0.1mm.
I have also studied and described a number of embryonic lethal genetic changes that stop development at stages where in humans most women would only be wondering if they might be pregnant. Embryonic life is a perilous process. That it works as often as it does and the vast majority of the failures go unnoticed does not change that. By pretending otherwise you are ignoring demostrable reality.
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Grant Dexter emoted:
Scientific fact:
At conception a baby is alive.
At conception a baby is human.At conception you have a conceptus not a baby. A baby is a well developed foetus. Not even embryos are babies, they are embryos. We have these terms for a reason. Think about it a woman who discovers she is pregnant says: I am going to have a baby. IOW in the future, once it has developed and is born she will have a baby.
I have asked this question of many pro-lifers on the net and in real life without any decent answers: when during the process of fertilisation does the result become human? (setting aside that it takes a human egg and a human sperm to make a human conceptus).
Here is a non comprehensive list of processes within the process of fertilisation, which is a process not an event. Feel free to choose one of them, or suggest your own as to where the process has reached a definitive point where we have a human conceptus:
Assume sperm ejaculation at a time when the woman is fertile.
The sperm acrosome reacts
the sperm binds the zona pellucida
The sperm penetrates the zona pellucida
The sperm binds the egg (but see cortical reaction)
There is fusion between the egg outer membrane and the sperm head membrane
The egg begins the cortical reaction, which spreads out from the site of sperm binding blocking the binding of further sperm.
The injection of the male pronucleus
The completion of the acrosome reaction
The breakdown of the pronuclear membranes
The initiation of dna synthesis
The completion of dna synthesis
Chromosome formation
Chromosome counting (opportunity to bail out if polyspermy has occurred)
Chromosome alignment
Formation of the cleavage band
Chromosome separation
Cleavage completion (and hence the formation of a two cell embryo).Note that even then you do not have a definite future human. It has been calculated that probably 40% or so of human conceptions fail to implant (a whole new process). Etc, etc, etc.
Life is a cyclic continuum my friend, nature often does not have the joints we wish to carve her at. But for our delight, delectation and amusement please draw away. Feel free also to justify your choice.
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Oh please no Andrew Hubbard lets not call in the philosophers to decide where to draw fuzzy lines that don't exist in nature. Here is how it should work and how it managed to work during the debates here in the UK where informed sense prevailed (Yay!):
The scientists/medics do their bit and hurry up publication of a very nice, statistically sound piece of research that shows no improvement in survival rates for infants born prior to 24 weeks (current abortion time limit) despite what the 'pro-life' lobby were bleating. It was in the BMJ iirc.
Then you organise various scientific/medical bigwigs to lobby the MPs, only you don't call it lobbying, you call them information or briefing sessions or some such. This immunises all MPs but the religiously committed and the challenge to roll us back towards the middle ages is seen off.
No philosophers needed thankyou very much.
When lines such as this where there are no lines in nature (and there are many more than most people realise) you bring in all the data you do have, decide on your desired outcome (like harm reduction, least worst etc) and consulting with (but not being bound by) the ethicists you have you elected representitives decide ensuring they are as fully informed as possible. Against their wills if necessary.
Everything else leads either to nothing being done or to violence. You have to have the debate in full light of day with as much info as possible aired because this cuts the rug out from anyone inclined to get seriously antsy if the result goes against their dearest held beliefs. Abortion doctors get shot in the US because the politicians are too scared to stand up for what is demonstrably true. So they get things like Just Say No sex ed. Sex ed without the Ed if you want Uncle Sam to fund your sex ed. They are not immune to the evidence that it not only doesn't work, it is harmful as iirc 16 States now refuse Federal funding of sex ed so they can do it sort of better but they lack national leadership in this.
So put the philosophers back in the box, this is not a knotty, difficult problem. It is perfectly solveable using Science, known ethics, reason and informed common sense. We should encourage MPs to go there and support them when they do.
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Having only served on one jury and that being here in Scotland the change to electing jury forepersons later in the trial is interesting. In the trial I served on we were not required to select a foreperson until we retired to consider our verdicts, though we had been warned of the need to give it some thought. Since the trial lasted a week we got to know each other well. To the extent that the female majority on the jury consulted each other and decided none of them wanted a bar of it and I was their choice to do it, democracy is a wonderful thing.