ericmurphy
Posts: 2460
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (thordaddy @ Mar. 27 2006,21:35) | | So life does have a "beginning," but only one beginning? Is this your stance? So your life began, scientifically-speaking, a couple of billions of years ago? Is this the claim? |
Life may have had many "beginnings." For all we know, life arose, and was wiped out (asteroid strike, solar flare, volcanism) multiple times, before finally becoming permanently (more or less) established on earth. But that happened billions of years ago, and yes, and I am at one end of an unbroken chain of living organisms going back that far. That's reality. Deal.
| Quote | Then in contradiction, you say,
"Merely framing the abortion debate in those terms demonstrates one's abysmal ignorance of biological fact.
"Life does not "begin" at conception. It "began" in the distant past. If schools are teaching that life begins at conception, they are teaching a falsehood."
So you go from "[l]ife doesn't have a beginning" (your words) to life "'began' in the distant past." Which is it? |
What I actually said was (this is the quote), "Life doesn't have a beginning, other than some time several billion years ago." Is there a contradiction there? If I say "There wasn't anyone in the car, other than the driver," am I contradicting myself? Are you a native speaker of the English language?
| Quote | | What I see is that you aren't sure whether life has a beginning or not and you might be billions of years old. LOL! |
No. What I see is that, like most anti-choice zealots, you cannot distinguish between "life" and "consciousness." When does consciousness begin is a valid question, and currently no one can honestly say for certain. But it's a solid hypothesis that consciousness requires a central nervous system, and a blastocyst sure doesn't have one of those.
As more than one person has pointed out to you, a fertilized ovum is no more "alive" than a sperm cell, or a paramecium, or a bacterium. And it's unclear whether it's any more "conscious" than any of them, either.
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2006 MVD award for most dogged defense of scientific sanity
"Atheism is a religion the same way NOT collecting stamps is a hobby." —Scott Adams
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