Aegnor wrote:
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So much wrong with this. Adaptability to a change in environments is required for something to be alive? Using that definition, one could argue that earth contains nothing that is living. There are MANY creatures that are extremely vulnerable to changes in environement. I hope you can see how this would be an incredibly bad way to define life.
An egg is a living cell of a female. Sperm is the living cell of a male. At the moment of conception, it becomes a genetically separate entity. The term for that entity is human. The stage of development for that human is zygote. At that point it is a living human being. This has nothing to do with religion or faith or anything other than scientific fact.
Now if you want to make the argument that a human being in the zygote stage of development has no rights, and therefore there is nothing wrong with abortion at that stage, then that is a perfectly logical argument. Not one I necessarily agree with, but it is logical. Saying that a zygote is not living, and not a human being, is not logical. If you deny that a zygote is living, then you are saying that MANY other organisms that we currently consider to be alive, are not in fact alive. If you deny that a zygote is of the human species, then you need to say what species it is, and provide evidnece, and then explain how it is possible for one species to transform into another species.
While scientists are still debating on the finer points of what they consider life, adaptability is actually one of the more stable bigger ones. We're not talking about taking someone and dropping them in the middle of nowhere, that’s not adaptability. I’ll let someone else who could express themselves better than I explain this.
This is from Daniel E. Koshland Jr (Science 22 March 2002: Vol. 295. no. 5563, pp. 2215 – 2216) (Linky to full text.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/f ... /5563/2215)
Quote:
The sixth pillar is ADAPTABILITY. Improvisation is a form of adaptability, but is too slow for many of the environmental hazards that a living organism must face. For example, a human that puts a hand into a fire has a painful experience that might be selected against in evolution--but the individual needs to withdraw his hand from the fire immediately to live appropriately thereafter. That behavioral response to pain is essential to survival and is a fundamental response of living systems that we call feedback. Our bodies respond to depletion of nutrients (energy supplies) with hunger, which causes us to seek new food, and our feedback then prevents our eating to an excess of nutrients (that is, beyond satiety) by losing appetite and eating less. Walking long distances on bare feet leads to calluses on one's feet or the acquisition of shoes to protect them. These behavioural manifestations of adaptability are a development of feedback and feed forward responses at the molecular level and are responses of living systems that allow survival in quickly changing environments. Adaptability could arguably include improvisation (pillar number 2), but improvisation is a mechanism to change the fundamental program, whereas adaptability (pillar number 6) is a behavioural response that is part of the program. Just as these two necessities are handled by different mechanisms in our Earth-bound system, I believe they will be different concepts handled by different mechanisms in any newly devised or newly discovered system.
I’ve never denied that the zygote is part of the human life cycle. I have never denied that it is a viable cell. What I do deny is that up to a certain point which I’m not 100% qualified to say, and can only speculate based on information I can access the early stages of a zygote does not fit the definition of life.
One of my biggest problem with Elmo’s theory is that he believes in a human, even prior to the point of conception had life. I agree with you in that human life is based on scientific facts rather than religion or faith. As such, under current research, life, by the scientific definition starts somewhere around the middle of the second trimester and ends with the death of the brain. For my personal opinion I prefer to be safe in such matters and place my judgement prior to the development of systems which puts it at 2/3 of the first trimester.