Haunted wrote:No, the DNA within may be of human origin, but so is the DNA in the mucus I sneeze out from time to time.
I sense deja vu, DNA on its own is not a human person. A zygote is in a state of development as children are.
And this is still an imprecise method of human labelling. As humans, we all have different genes that give rise to different characteristics, e.g. dark skin, different eye-lids, hair colour etc. Where the line is drawn between species is still arbitrary.
Quite dangerous idea that. I could decide I don't know that people with a certain level of skin pigmentation are a different species and so not afforded human rights, which I grant members of my species, since they are not the same species.
Oh come on I had a whole paragraph here about expression that was worth a response. You are doing a great job of making my point that it is impossible to define when non-life becomes life, unless you interpret things as a gradual development i.e. precisely what it is.
I stated my preference of the genome assembly and then the initiation of gene expression. You've heard plenty about what I think on this matter. How about you make the case for your definition, bearing in mind the problem of arbitrariness.
I say such an attitude is immoral, whether they serve us or not should not enter into the question of whether it is moral to protect them.
Make your case, state your proofs.
Considering the distruption and destruction that humans are causing to the ecosystems globally, I'd argue that these problems are a symptoms of are above nature if you like it or expressed in a different fashion no longer being controlled by ecological controls which affect every other animal. Humans do not seem to fit well in nature, which many cultures have seen as the condition of man.
Humans are a product of nature, a particularly good one in terms of ability to thrive. Ecosystems come and go all the time (granted, on longer timescales than we are currently experiencing) and you forget that survival of life is a constant struggle and that it is perfectly natural for entire species to go extinct due to the tenacity of another. As an aside, human expansion will be curbed by nature eventually (we are already about 2 billion people over the capacity of the planet and this is going to rise) whether that be through virus' or famines.
Mules.
Infertile hybrids.
Or peripatry or parapatry.
I'm open to the idea given sufficient evidence.
Mules, and yes, some of them are fertile.
They cannot sustain their population effectively. Also even in the case of fertile hybrids, they are quite often maladapted and cannot fill a viable niche.
Right,so at which exact point did the species change? If species are absolute then there must be one generation where one is different to the other. If species are not absolute then the change could've been gradual i.e. exactly what it is in nature, gradual change. My point has always been that 'species' are labelled arbitrarily. At large scales (in time) these look pretty easy to make but as we now know that life isn't fixed but is constantly in flux these labels become very blurry. The overlaps become significant.
Not necessarily in the case of allopatric speciation where one population becomes divided in to. The distribution of characteristics (e.g. skin, eye, hair colour) becomes shift to one or other of the possibilities because that is being selected for by that environment. Meanwhile the other part of the original population might be selected for something else. Over time these two populations that were one species become reproductively isolated. So there is a gradual change, but also a point which maybe be impossible to pin point distinctly when they are reproductively isolated and at which point speciation occurs.
A similar situation could arise in sympatric whereby a population becomes isolated within the same geographic area by filling two different niches due to competition pressures. These niches may cause temporal isolation or cultural isolation in the great apes. Whereby there is a gradual reduction in gene transfer to the point that the two populations interbreed rarely. Eventually over sufficient time these two populations acquire characteristics which make successful hybridisation impossible.
Which is why we are talking about this because us humans happen to overlap rather significantly with Chimps, Cro-Magnon and Homo Sapien Idaltu. Why aren't they persons? Where is absolute line? How many generations of your ancestors must we go back before you claim that your great great great great great great.............great great great grandmother was NOT HUMAN?
This is an interesting question, for which I do not have an full answer. In short I would say that we reserve personhood to homo sapiens. If these other species existed today perhaps we would extend personhood to them too. Consider what we do know: our offspring are human.
Only a sith deals in absolutes.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
I laughed.
Reproductive isolation is used, but there are enough examples in nature to tell us that it only works for widely temporally separated lifeforms. As such it is insufficient to say that species are absolute and distinct because of this.
The majority of microorganism cannot be cultured, principally because we do not know the conditions of the minutes niches which they exploit. However that does not mean we have not identified a great diversity of different microbes. We do not just say there are all one species. Genetic sequence comparisons are made to differentiate between them.
No it does not, however this is meaningless because e.coli do not reproduce via sex.
Not in the classical sense, however they do employ sex pili through which plasmids are exchanged. They cannot do this with every microbe they encounter. So one would say that their are reproductively isolated from those microbes.
Coming up for a million yeas if it were human time scales. About the time homo erectus became extinct.
Quite conservative little beasties then, I like them. They are very useful in the lab too.
The starting population was a single cell, i.e. no diversity and bacteria, by definition, do not have mitochondria.
The number of generations in this experiment is determined pretty well because they counted them.
It will have been estimated surely, based on know generation times under various conditions.
The development of a human is a gradual process, there was just of as much of their ancestral DNA in the male as there was in the female. The embryo was not a product of the female, but the product of the forced introduction of male gametes into the female.
Human development is gradual but there is no transmutation of species in that development. Yes the sperm was forced into the female. However you would not retrospectively kill adults who were the products of rape.
However, what has dignity to do with existence? Is there dignity in being the cause of your mothers death? Also, from the 1948 UDHR:
"Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
Think that's significant? They don't bother to define explicitly what a human is but this is as close as they'll probably get.
It continues:
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 6
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.[/quote]
So we only become persons when we leave the womb? Sounds arbitrary to me.
And I am advocating two counter positions.
1. That they are not human 'persons' (again trouble defining what you mean by this).
2. They are human life, but it is justifiable to kill humans in certain circumstances.
Both of which are easy to justify, maybe slightly less so the second when abortions are done for convenience rather than medical reasons. A caesarian still carries with it a risk to the mother, one that she should not have to take because of the situation that was forced upon her, she has been through enough.
(* I thought we moved it up to gene expression?)
I think the second position is more honest and would be very happy if the law in the UK and elsewhere adopted such an approach compared with the current situation. The second approach a least allows for debate as to the justification and for freedom of conscience.
Laicise =/= excommunication. Why has the Vatican tried to protect these priests? What would god have to say about all this?
No but Canon law has chosen to reserve excommunication for the most serious of transgressions, abortion being one of them. On matters of faith and morals the Church is infallible, however mistakes can be made in executing justice and administering dioceses and sanctioning priests. The Church is made up of people who sin, this is a prime example of why Jesus' sacrifice was needed.
"Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision."
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908
. Concern about sinning and acting with decency are two sides of the same coin.
