Anonymous #1 1w

This initial thing isn’t a gotcha or me arguing something yet. This is me determining what your stances are so I can see how I need to argue.

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Anonymous #1 1w

Well, I personally believe that life begins at conception. Don’t you?

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Anonymous OP 1w

I used to, because I was raised Catholic and was taught that upon conception an embryo gains a soul. However now not only am I not religious, I also now have a degree in biology, and have come to understand that “life” is a very complex term and that there are no set lines. The idea of something being a person upon conception is incompatible with biological reality, and something being a person is much more vague and dependent upon degrees of consciousness

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Anonymous #1 1w

So what do I mean when I say the idea of something being a person upon conception is incompatible with biological reality? The thing is that no organism is a single unit, it’s a complex of cells. A great many cells can be kept alive in a culture outside of a larger body. And in the right conditions just about every nucleated diploid cell has the capacity to grow into an entire organism.

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Anonymous #1 1w

So sure we could say that when a sperm fertilizes an egg, boom that’s a person. But biology is messy and it doesn’t like adhering to lines we set. For example, genetic chimeras. These happen in humans plenty but are easier to observe in animals. This is when two fraternal twin embryos fuse together and create one organism, but with different genetics. So if each embryo has its own soul upon conception and is two people, wouldn’t a chimeric person have two souls?

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Anonymous #1 1w

You have similar problems with many different examples. Identical twins are from one fertilized embryo which split later in development. Sometimes one identical twin doesn’t develop properly and is absorbed by the other, and can be reduced to just being a tumor.

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Anonymous #1 1w

You could create a full person without any conception ever happening. Obviously there’s cloning, where the nucleus of a body cell is put into an unfertilized egg whose nucleus is removed and can then develop into an embryo (no conception involved). But you could, with the right genetic and hormonal triggers, convert body cells into stem cells and then into an embryo. No one has ever gone that far but it’s possible, no conception at any point.

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Anonymous #1 1w

So if it’s possible to create an entire person with no conception involved, or to create two people from one conception, or to create one person from two conceptions, conception isn’t really a useful metric

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