Slashdot Mirror
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."
Does this mean that people are willing to acknowledge that fertilization is the start of life for individuals in a species that reproduces via sperm and egg?
If it so, all babys will have a 10$ per head payment to the owner? Or thats how the patent system has been working of late.
With the new monthly subscription service it will be $10 per month or they will terminate your life
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
LI
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
So if I mate with a fruit fly and she doesn't conceive....I'll know why.
Just when you thought you'd get rid of those flies for some time now during the winter, scientists come up with a way to help those damn flies to reproduce?
Full Tilt
God is dead.
And they would need suicide bombers—why? Kick back, enjoy life and watch your hatred's work progress via multigenerational warfare.
the faulty sperm: "Heelllpp Meeeeeeeee"
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
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.
Yeah, that episode of Stargate: SG-1 was pretty good, wasn't it?
I wondered where they put the Start button for Windows Vista.
LOL. I stopped watching SG-1 like three years ago after it got a little... ridiculous. Didn't see that one. :)
'2010'
:)
Seems like all good ideas come from SF
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
"...scientists from the UK and France have may found a gene responsible for controlling the fertilization of a new egg."
Shortly after this discovery, the gene that controls bad grammar was found in gollum123.
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
when the first in-vitro fertilization was performed?
Gee, we have progressed!
People always argue when or whether a fetus or even a zigote is considered a human being. I think this is a pathetic arguement. Who gives a fuck if it is a 'human life' under undefined terms, or under your defined terms, it is a living organism for crying out loud! What in the world makes you think you have the privilege, oh I'm sorry, the 'right' as you call it, to take the life of an absolutely helpless innocent child? Can that baby kill you with it's oh-so-sharp teeth? Can it plot to kill you several days after birth? No, it can't, and if you don't have the common sense to use protection I think you deserve what you get.
Abortion is LEGAL GENOCIDE. Simple as that.
Life is common. It is intelligent life that is special. There really isn't much of that and none on sloshdat...
Oh well, what the hell...
Fruit flies like a banana
G Marx
Help fight continental drift.
"bootstrap code"...
:-)
Anyone know if it's an Award or a Phoenix?
(In any case, the ramifications are stupendous - literally
seems that we're learning something new about genes every day,
like the story yesterday about Black Death/Plague and HIV)
But gene therapy using viruses generally doesn't affect the testicles or ovaries - see that's the part that carries the genetic information and spreads it to the offspring - and AFAIK, AIDS targets only white cells.
Besides, if permanent, inheritable gene therapy had been discovered, there wouldn't be any cases of Down syndrome and other diseases, because people would've been vaccined already!
heck, we could have vaccined people with the delta-32 gene and get rid of AIDS once and for all!
But guess what, we aren't there yet.
Interesting thought. But I'm placing my bet on good ol' human nature to stop this one in its tracks. The kind of people that want to kill all those $ENEMY bastards are generally more motivated by self interest than anything else, so this plan's too slow to accomplish anything in that regard.
Why was this modded -1?
you just made my day. Couldn't think of a better excuse.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
No Human Fly jokes? /me ducks ballistic vegetables
Nietzche Is Dead ~ God
It is official; Netcraft confirms: God is DEAD.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered God community when IDC confirmed that God market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all dieties. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that God has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. God is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict God's future. The hand writing is on the wall: God faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for God because God is dead. Things are looking very bad for God. As many of us are already aware, God continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeGod is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of His core preachers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeGod preachers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeGod is dead.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenGod leader Theo states that there are 7000 followers of OpenGod. How many followers of NetGod are there? Let's see. The number of OpenGod versus NetGod posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD followers. God/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetGod posts. Therefore there are about 700 followers of God/OS. A recent article put FreeGod at about 80 percent of the *God market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeGod followers. This is consistent with the number of FreeGod Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeGod went out of business and was taken over by GodI who sell another troubled diety. Now GodI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that God has steadily declined in market share. God is very sick and His long term survival prospects are very dim. If God is to survive at all He will be among diety dilettante dabblers. God continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save Him at this point in time. For all practical purposes, God is DEAD.
The ridiculous episodes are the best part. Just ask Murray!
Who is John Cabal?
Praise God, who in His infinite wisdom and omnipotence, used the same genetic methodology in fruit flies as He used in that created in His image.
He works in mysterious ways, so don't bother to wonder why He couldn't optimize the system in each species.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Stage 2...
Booting Human Organism (2.6.13) in 5...4...3...2...1...
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
...but then again, why must God be unknowable or even mysterious? Maybe we're just getting closer.
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.
Where do I sign up?
I am a strict materialist, as you seem to be. Therefore, I agree that organic life has no "animating spirit" that fundamentally distinguishes it from non-life. In that sense, you are correct that life is just "an elaborate pile of goo".
On the other hand, human life exhibits some characteristics that are currently beyond all scientific explanation. In particular, I am thinking of free will, conciousness, and self-awareness (which are all probably words for the same underlying phenomenon). No one has the slightest idea how these characteristics arise in a human (and, puzzlingly, don't seem to in any other form of life).
While this doesn't necessarily imply that humans have "souls", it does leave the question very much up in the air. Therefore, it is entirely possible that your personal pile of goo is home to some extremely unusual processes. Some have speculated, for example, that quantum mechanical uncertainity is at the heart of free will. In this sense, the difference between "human" and "a bunch of cells" is an immense one.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Apparently, He left brain cells out of Muslims. Islam in action against Christians
That's OK, they're just infidel Christians.
"Religion of Peace" my ass.
that we as a society can define death as when the higher level brain is no longer functioning AND has not capability to do so again. The smart way to define human life would seem to be the opposite of that definition. And yet, there are so many who try to change that. Some by creating a none life (pro-choice), when it is obvious that it is (at the very least, if the fetus can live outside the womb AND has higher brain function, then it must be alive). Then there are others who wish to extend the creation of life back to the beginning, will still accepting the above as death.
Too funny.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Is HIRA intended as wordplay on HERA, the wife of Zeus and Queen of the Olympian deities? I ran a quick search and found no such suggestion. Hera is an ancient mother goddess worshipped as the source of life. She is an aspect of the White Goddess whose three representations are a young mother (colour blue), a warring matriarch (colour red), a death hag (colour black).
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
That's because infertile couples have lots of kids who pass on their infertility genes to their kids and so on...
You mean like suicide bombers?
Mmmmhmm. because when terrorists want to make a point and wreak havok they often go the the most non-sensational, subtle and long term but slowly effective methods available. Right. But let's continue thinking along the lines of OH NOES! won't someone think of the terrorists?!! Because, you know, even though its irrational, that's more exciting. Right?
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
how do i mod this bootstrap code to load linux?
Just as long as Dr. Van Parijs, formerly of MIT's biology department had absolutely no involvement with collecting the data.
My rights don't need management.
the GPP makes a number of small errors. The pp corrects them.
Wasn't this along the thoughts of Bill Joy (fromerly of Sun) and his fear of having such open access to critical technology? It is a scary thought that one person or a small group of people can stop the entire human race.
Charles Jo
If you are alluding to the abortion/stem-cell/IVF debates, the question isn't really weather life begins at conception, but rather moral personhood.
I would have to say that a fertilized egg is "alive" by any meaningful standard you can come up with. Bacteria are indisputably alive, and a fertilized egg is even more complex and larger. The cell has potential to reproduce and is metabolizing, which are often used as tests as to whether something is alive.
The three debates I mentioned above are not technical or scientific debates. Rather, they are moral, philosophical debates. In other words, they are not disagreements about what is, but what ought to be. Science can never answer such questions.
Goddammit don't mod him interesting; I'm sick of this 'terrorist' thing coming up on every friggin' topic already.
mnemonic is dead.
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/
Some have speculated, for example, that quantum mechanical uncertainity is at the heart of free will.
Could someone expand on this? From what I understand, the cells in our brains are much too large to be aware of or take advantage of any quantum uncertainty...
I have never met any American, left, center or right, who is at all pleased with the "mass slaughter of Iraqi and Afghani children".
Can you provide even one example?
Or are you just making "#$# up?
Yeah right.
Like a bunch of raving durka durkas are going to be able to accomplish anything like that.
Under your logic, you would also permit murder of fully sentient adult humans! After all, you wouldn't want to force your belief that murder is wrong upon others?
It is perfectly logical and self-consistent to use force in order to prevent one person from harming another. I daresay you would hate living in a world that did not adopt this general standard.
If the zygote has rights, the fact that it could reproduce does not diminish its rights - it enhances them!
Have you seen the replacement rates in Europe (both eastern and western)? They are well below the replacement rate (approx. 2.1 children/fertile woman), resulting in exponential population decay. By most projections, the muslim to non-muslim demographics in France are expected to flip within less than 50 years (and that's a conservative estimate). Terrorists don't need to do anything to prevent Europeans (and Canadians, Australians, etc.) from breeding; they are doing a very good job by themselves without any help.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
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?
Postmenopausal women, by that definition, are not alive. I suppose it means a reproductive phase in the life cycle, not constant fertility. And neither are folks in a coma, as they don't really respond to stimuli, right.
Oh, wait, it included the phrase "at least once during their existence". Never mind.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Why would an engineered device that satisfied those criteria not be life? ("Because people made it" isn't a valid answer.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
What, exactly, is a "moonbat"?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I mean, girls' souls are a different color than boys' -- so God can't have handed the thing a soul until that's settled.
This also brings up the point that many theolgians have seriously, seriously discussed -- that a fetus must not be granted a soul until it's PAST the point where it may split into twins... because then each twin would only have HALF a soul.
Heady stuff, I know.
"But who are you, so wise in the ways of science?"
For the sake of argument, justify that statement. (1) If the zygote is alive, why should it not receive equal protections?
(2) If, somehow, you managed to imbed an already born person into the body of another person, would that person lose the claim to equal protections?
I'm not the GP poster, but here are some thoughts on this (#2 is especially interesting to me):
1) We don't afford equal protection to all living things. Only "humans", and a zygote with no brainstem yet, etc. doesn't fit into that category in everyone's book. The definition is complicated, because it's not consistent with mental development, etc -- i.e., the average guinea pig has more brain function than some people with severe brain damage or serious genetic defects... but it's very hard to pin this one down. "Potential human" as a concept is just as fraught.
2) You're forgetting that two people's rights are involved here, and the fact that one of the people would be totally and parasitically dependant on the other. If I woke up one morning and a psycho missing some essential organ had wired himself to me so that he'd *die* if we separated him, I definitely *do* *not* think his right to live would trump my right to live free of him. Think about it. Cut the sucker free; it's not my problem.
So how does the law work on related questions? Suppose you had identical twins who hated each other, and one would die without a kidney but the other refused to give it. Obviously there's a huge moral question here, but could the twin be legally FORCED to undergo the operation and give up a kidney? I have a feeling that the answer here is "no", but I don't know.
Really, really interesting stuff.
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
Or do I just misunderstand the term?
I was hoping there was a new break through in the puzzle that is cell specialization. I mean, all the cells carry the same genetic code. How is it that they start to realize which ones should become heart cells, brain cells etc and also to specialize in the right location relative to others.
Has this question been answered already?
Now lemme stipulate da real to y'all. Um, as to start of live, if that lil' zygote test tube baby can't toast me up some garlic bread and fetch me some chiante, hang out and ride a bike, play some Nintendo wit daddy, sit all up on my lap and listen to my lame ass stories or simply crappy up a nappy then they ain't wit da livin' dig? Until dat lil' science experiment pops out da oven and is all cooing/sleeping/cryin' in ya arms and growin' up ta be a general pains in da behinds and yo main reasonification fo gons to work fo da man ( face it you quacks, you all slave to "da man") den dat lil' bastad ain't but a meat byproduct. Or at least that be my twisted take. But then, you ever seen some dumb bastad tryin' to talk football stats to da hopeful son in mama's belly? PU-THET-NICS Y'ALL. Ait not no person till dat lil' bundle O' joy is all up in yo arms and just a wreckin' yo life. Now STFU! Ahem!
--The secret to walkin' on da water is knowin' where da rocks is! Aqua-boogey baby! [Bootsy Collins]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
Time and space genes .
Cant move or remember anything without them.
Maybe life starts years before birth.
They should patent it ... just to see the Pope go berzerk on television.
Now now, you can't just go about saying that a fertilized egg is 'life'.
That could lead you down a path that might interfere with a womans right to choose what to do with her body.
Utopia forbid.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The start of life gene doenst kick in until either speech or 'Screw You' is uttered. Sheep they is until then.
"Sperm makes this change by swapping the type of 'packing material, known as histone proteins, it contains.
The result is called the male pronucleus, which can then combine with the female pronucleus.
The process is controlled by the HIRA gene. "
In other words:
The female downloads the executable to her ovum and attempts to insert it into the Egg OS... the HIRA (VM) runs the male code and translates it into the local Egg OS opcodes so the egg can run it...
Insert whiney geek laughter here followed by obligatory monty python quote...
(Okay that's not QUITE right, but then it wouldn't be funny... But it does strike me as pretty close to the mechanism that's going on there...)
Funniest thing ever posted to Slashdot
You are retarded.
You obviously have as much hate for "them" as "they" have for you. You would just as soon kill them as they you, and that makes you both just about equal. You no longer see them as people, because you have written them off as evil with no goal in life but to kill "white caucasians" (is it just me or is that a bit redundant?). They have a reason for what they do, and it is not simply "hatred" or "insanity". They have families and loved ones and motivations and ups and downs just like you "white caucasians" do. Until we all learn to TALK to eachother and find out what eachother's motivations are, we will never learn to get along. White westerns (aka Americans) are stuck in a problematic cycle of escalating badwill with Muslims (maybe even Arabs on the whole). The problem being that Muslims (again maybe Arabs in general) felt wronged by America. A small group of Arabs finally takes "revenge" against America (9/11) for whatever (there are a number of reasons why they may feel they need to take revenge. The reasons are too many to list here). So America takes revenge on them in Afghanistan and again in Iraq. Now the Arabs'll feel the need for revenge again. And so on ad infinitum. Eventually we all need to just stop and talk this stuff out. They want our military bases off of their holy land (for starters), America (of course) wants oil and peace (I personally want peace... not sure about the administration). We need to find a way to start compromising and working towards some sort of a treaty or pact.
OH yeah. And if they could "just" modify the HIV virus in that way (which would be SO simple, cuz you implied it would be), then that would be something. Then they'd have magically achieved what mainstream medical science has so far failed at doing. And that's effective gene therapy. Oh and the HIV virus doesn't infect our reproductive cells (they infect immune cells dumbass), so your little diabolical plan wouldn't work anyway. OH and there's less genetic difference between two people of different races than there is between a short and tall person. So having your mythical virus somehow "detect" these miniscule differences would be impossible. OH and viruses don't pick and choose who they infect. As far as I know there is no natural example of a virus somehow examing its prey's DNA and then deciding whether or not to infect the prey based on the DNA. And there's no artificial means to make that happen.
So yeah basically you're freakin stupid is what I'm trying to say.
The reason many people suspect that the HIV virus was designed to target the gay and black communities is that that is where it originally appeared. And the belief in those days (at least the belief of many conservative right-wingers) was that inter-racial dating didn't (or maybe shouldn't) happen, and you couldn't swing both ways. So maybe these right-wingers introduced a virus into those populations hoping or assuming that it would be contained in only those populations, based on a *social* model.
Dumbass.
wait. Our birthrate is ALREADY below the replacement rate due to our own lifestyle decisions. No virus needed.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
or this will happen! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091064/
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
sexual reproduction, while old, is not the root of life. All early life was asexual. Sex was just an evolutionary breakthrough that allowed more rapid evolution. So calling this gene the "start of life" is not really all that accurate.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Sounds like there is potential to develop a great male contraceptive out of this, too.
Be even better if a single gene therapy would damage the HIRA gene, and another could reverse the damage.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Its fun to be anonymous, is all.
Let's see... non-sensational, subtle and long term methods... well... you got me... they don't do it that way at all. Except maybe for long term methods... they (the religiously intolerant ones who subvert Islam for their own needs-- lets be clear...) already have decades of experience in extremist indoctrination down pat. Let's hope they never learn to become subtle.
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 .
I'm confused. My knee jerk reaction is too blame the parents for everything. Now they say the fault lies with a gene. How dare Slashdot challenge my worldview!
Apparrently the replacement rate in the US is around 2.06 (in 2000) so it's not as bad as it is in Europe-- where they have already begun some social programs to encourage people to have families. One plan in Germany that makes childless individuals pay more for nursing home premiums seems a little... discriminatory. It's not clear to me if it works this way, but if you're at retirement age and need assisted living, it's a little late for you to have and raise children to cut yourself some slack in retirement. If this punitive kind of program keeps working there, I can see it encouraging emigration of the childless-elderly.
I know people who have lost their legs, are they no longer human? What makes us human, our shape? Our fingers? Our brains make us human ("Humm, brains" - sorry, Simpsons flashback). Neurological development should be the guiding factor in determining when the fetus turns from just another organism into a human.
Admittedly I'm walking out into hotly contested area here, but I also feel that such quantum events are required for the essence of free will...otherwise you are merely a state machine. My basic "religious" theory is that the "soul" is what decides the actual outcomes of the quantum events within the brain that are connected to "consciousness", and thus the soul can't actually "bind" to the being until the brain has formed to a certain degree. My guess is that time is somewhere around the beginning of the third trimester but I could be wrong.
So, he's saying there's something going on at a sub-neural level in the brain that effects our decisions and creativity in slight ways. And that this phenomenon only happens in human brains. (Why only human?)
Sounds like a soul to me.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Why on earth would I visit such a site?
You might be able to drag up some neo-Nazi-like trash to demonstrate the existence of such an absurd thought, but the assertion that it is in any way mainstream is silly.
The line is certainly arbitrary, but it has to be drawn somewhere. Quickening has been a traditional time point, birth is another, conception yet another. But some societies found it acceptable to kill newborn children, as a method of birth control. In Iceland, before the missionaries converted everyone, infanticide was an acceptable practice--the infants were left to die of exposure, i.e., freezing to death. The Spartans did the same thing, and with a disturbing frequency.
I personally think abortion is a necessary evil--no one would argue abortions are a good thing, except perhaps Cartman on South Park. Birth control ought to be readily available to everyone, including Plan B ("morning after" pill) and abortions, because unwanted children are most often the ones who turn out to be criminals or screwups. If a child is unwanted, best to get rid of it as fast as possible, while the damage is minimal. Think about all the cases where an unwanted child grows up to be a murderer. Wouldn't it have been better if he'd been aborted? Of course it's best to prevent an unwanted pregnancy from occuring in the first place, if at all possible; but from a practical standpoint, I think the current legal standard is reasonable.
Now you have a consistent argument: any termination of pregnancy is undesirable, and is more distasteful the older the fetus gets, and an arbitrary place where we (the US) draw the legal line is after two trimesters. Happy?
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
The whole "race" thing is a myth. It's a phenotype, not a genotype, so it doesn't really match up with the genes. Kinda like Hitler having dark hair, etc. with the "ideal arian" having blonde hair & blue eyes, whoever was stupid enough to make one of these would have to hope that they checked their own genetic profile rather well :P
:)
Oh, and these things have a bad habit of mutating, too. Which tends to put a damper on the whole thing
> Lastly- you can say "Abortion is legal ______ (I would say infanticide, but that definition doesn't really fit either)," but the fact is that it is legal.
:)
I'm disturbed by the notion that one's ethics "should" match up with 51% (or whatever) of the populace. Not to mention the fact that, depending on who goes to the Supreme Court next, this may not be true in the US in the near future.
> So, neener neener neener. Please, come back when you have some sensical arguments and aren't typing while slobering over a Bible.
Well, this isn't usually the place where one comes for sensible arguements, now, is it?
Wading into the quagmire here...
One of the observations I have personally made about abortion and fetal rights is how the mainstream society handles naturally-occurring miscarriages. I don't know of anyone who names an early-term miscarriage. However, if it is a person, shouldn't receive a proper religious funeral? Similarly, the Catholic Church (with which I am most familiar) won't baptize an in-utero fetus, so again, if it were a person, shouldn't it be eligible?
I'm not sure where the line needs to be drawn and I have a deeply unsettled mind regarding abortion. However, I'd like some consistency in the logic being forced upon society by the religious right.
Which came first, the H1RA gene or the egg?
Reminds me of that old joke of someone saying that sterility runs in the family...
Seriously though, some people definitely have more trouble. My parents did. They didn't believe in using drugs, so they researched fertility cycles. Interestingly enough, in the four week cycle, a female can only become pregnant in three days of that cycle. By virtue of NFP, they have six children. *wry grin* Although that leads to another old joke...
What do you call people who use the Rhythm Method?
Parents.
And, since I told that joke, I feel obligated to mention that NFP is not the Rhythm Method. It has a similar concept, watching natural cycles, but it's much more advanced, with a 99.9% success rate when used to prevent conception.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
God isn't dead! He just got the hell out of here!!
Ah, so you're a Deist, then?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
The argument is usually presented as "IF late-term abortion is okay, then infanticide is okay". This usually leads to "late-term abortion is not okay".
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Having fallen victim to thought loops many times, I'd personally say it's the equivalent of a watchdog timer that fixes it, and not some inherent quantum property that prevents the mind getting into them in the first place.
"...the lack of any such numbers in your list is a failure of imagination on your part." [strike "the" in original].
However, from a legal and moral perspective, we have consistently held that articles XIII, XV, and XIX were enacted because we finally realized that we had been artificially restricting the rights of some humans because we did not properly recognize their humanity. Few now would argue that blacks did not actually have a moral right to vote prior to the passage of Amendment XV. Rather, our collective understanding is that the right for blacks to vote was implied in the Constitution and Declaration, but went undiscovered until 1869, when XV was adopted. We did not expand society in 1869; we righted a fundamental injustice that had previously gone uncorrected. It was our failure to correctly empathize with women and blacks that kept us from granting them full rights from the beginning, in 1789.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.