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Start of Life Gene Discovered
gollum123 writes "The BBC reports that scientists from the UK and France have may found a gene responsible for controlling the fertilization of a new egg." From the article: "The HIRA gene is involved in the events necessary for the fertilisation that take place once a sperm enters an egg. Faults in this gene might explain why some couples struggle to get pregnant despite having healthy sperm ... Although their work in Nature is based on fruit flies, the same genetic processes are present in humans."
The question is not whether the freshly-fertilised egg is 'alive', but whether it can be considered human. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas* considered an unborn boy to have a soul at 40 days, and an unborn girl to have one at 80; before those times, he saw the foetus to be non-human. At what point to we declare the bundle of multiplying cells to be human, and at what point are they afforded the same rights? I doubt these new findings will bring much insight to this rather contentious question.
* A-level Ethics and Philosophy pays off again!
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
And they would need suicide bombers—why? Kick back, enjoy life and watch your hatred's work progress via multigenerational warfare.
One wonders if gene therapy is a possibility. Could this gene be "repaired" allowing couples previously unable to conceive to have children? If so it may spell the end to births of "litters" as those are mostly due to fertility drugs.
I stole this sig from a more creative user.
I find it even funnier that Republicans throw a massive tantrum with regards to abortion in the US, even when done under the best possible circumstances (ie. as early as possible, and so forth). Yet they feel compelled, eager and even overjoyed to participate in the mass slaughter of actual Iraqi and Afghani children via their "war on terror". Then again, your Republicans these days are as hypocritical as your Democrats.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
No. Not in this case. The mother has no control over whether the fertilised egg is implanted into the uterus. In fact, the woman isn't even pregnant until this happens. The egg will die (stop replicating) by itself without the nutrients provided by the uteris walls.
Just a note, I personally don't have anything against (most) abortions, but I can see the point of view of those who are against abortion and for the death penalty.
Its basically that the fetuses have done nothing to deserve death, while the criminals have.
Effectively, for most, its about sin and biblical justice.
A man beat up his pregnant wife with the specific intent to abort the baby she was carrying. He was successful. The mother survived. In addition to the assault charge, the DA wanted to charge him with the murder of the unborn child. The court dismissed the claims very reluctantly, calling upon the state legislature to fix the criminal statutes. They took up the invitation but left an exception for abortion.
Yeah. We love to have our cake and eat it, too.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
This means that modern medicine will soon be able to detect infertile couples by testing for the HIRA gene and help these couples reproduce, for example through early in-vitro fertilization (early while the woman is young and has little pregnancy risk).
Of course, this means that the descendants will also carry HIRA, thus greatly increasing their chances they'll require assistance to reproduce.
This is like a repeat-customer wet dream for a clinic chain owner, you know. When the IVF clinic owner's kids will inherit the clinic, they'll also inherit a sound customer base.
It reminds me of these PC repairs technicians that just reinstall Windows on the same spyware-laden machine every month instead of training their customers to use Linux or a Mac. Repeat business.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Yeah right.
Like a bunch of raving durka durkas are going to be able to accomplish anything like that.
Why hand-optimize the system when you can use genetic programming to optimize the system to perfection? While you may never get as good a result as if you'd gone in and tweaked all those millions of genes yourself, you're letting the system do all the hard work and the end result will be "good enough" to perform its job efficiently. It's exactly the way I'd have done it!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The little rogue watched researchers trying to teach his foster-mother how to use lexigrams. When she failed and was sent away, Kanzi started pecking away at the keyboard on his own -- with no human encouragement / motivation. To this day Kanzi is the only non-human I'm aware of who will work with researchers without a reward-based system. An anthropologist was able to teach him to create stone tools (setting him on par with Homo habilis -- or humans 2.5mya), and Kanzi has even played music with Paul McCartney.
A good site for info on Kanzi:
http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwlrc/biographies/kanzi.htm
Even the slightly less intelligent and significantly more aggressive common chimps have social structures similar to our own (the 'alpha male' is determined by who has the most supporters / thugs).
He's probably referring to the book by Roger Penrose and Martin Gardner (both brilliant minds, to be sure) called "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics". In that book, Penrose makes a rather detailed argument for the fact that the essence of human-ness, whatever that is (consciousness, creativity, free will, etc...), the thing that we are desperately trying and failing to create with strong-AI efforts (AI that *really* can operate on a human level, not the stuff that gets marketed as "AI"), depends on some quantum effects in the brain. I haven't actually read the book (but I should), only seen reviews of it.
I'm guessing he's just getting very technical about an idea that I've also always harbored about human intelligence vs AI - that a lot of the "magic" of how the human brain works boils down to have a good random number generator deep down inside every neuron that has a small chance to perturb the neuron's normal output and give you something unexpected. A quantum probability effect somewhere within the neuron would fit the bill nicely. On the scale and complexity of the brain, that small probability of "error" (as opposed to how an otherwise relatively rigid neural network would perform) could give rise to creativity, and also break loops (a problem detailed by Hofstated in the GEB and MMT books - how can you construct a peice of (sufficiently complex) software such that it will never get stuck in an infinite loop regardless of the inputs? You really can't - but a true AI needs that capability, or it will get stuck often. Small random perturbations in neuron decisions gaurantees that you won't keep re-executing the same response to the same feedbacked stimulus over and over and over)
11*43+456^2
We all seem to understand that when we're talking about adults
This is an essential point. I was starting to counter your "bum" example with the addition of the conceit that this bum was not sleeping, but surviving on your blood ("but I'll die if you don't let me feed for the next... 9 months!") when I realized that's a dead end in more way than one.
We *aren't* dealing with an independant adult, or even an independant *organism*. A fetus is not a bum, and it is not sitting in a steakhouse with you. The mother can't just say to the zygote "look, I won't hurt you, but let's just go our separate ways". We are dealing with what is initially a single cell, that is gradually going to resemble a human infant more and more until (finally) it is developed enough that it can survive independantly, at which point the mother's body will hopefully force it out of her at the right time and without complications.
Do you see how this is so complex? Suppose you could perform an abortion by teleporting the fetus out of the womb without otherwise harming it in any way. Okay, so the mother isn't "killing" it, she's just no longer allowing it access to her body (but of course it will die, because it cannot survive as an independant organism). I'm obviously playing with semantics here to make a point -- do you think she might have this right?
This is the real root of the pro-choice argument for me -- that her right to control her body trumps the right of the potential human growing inside her to control her body.
Personally... if my wife got pregnant right now (and we aren't planning on having a child yet!), we would not abort it. I don't think of a fetus as "just a random bundle of cells", etc. -- but if my wife changed her mind and decided to have an abortion I don't think the courts should be able to override that decision and force her to endure the 9 months, massive hormone changes, physical risks and side-effects, PPD, etc. etc. on behalf of the fetus.
[Thanks for replying -- I'm finding this a very interesting conversation!]