(June 7, 2021 at 8:16 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: Given that fertilization is the beginning of a new organism,
But is it? Fertilization has causes. The egg would not have been fertilized were it not for "the couple had intercourse," or some other cause that is necessary for fertilization to happen in the first place. That's the point.
You're choosing the middle domino as the "beginning of a new organism," ... but what I'm saying is that there are many dominos before that (and after that) that are necessary for a human birth. Why not assign equal weight to those?
Now I understand Helios' use of the word "arbitrary." Because, in the grand scheme, fertilization is not an arbitrary process. But what's arbitrary is you naming it the beginning of the organism.
Quote:I'm not sure how the preceding events have relevance? Whether those events involved sex, locking eyes, fertility clinics, or the vast array of colorful methods used by different species to bring gametes together, fertilization is the only necessary process by which a new organisms is created.
There are single-celled organisms that bypass this process. And (hypothetically) you could do the same with humans.
Let's consider a collection of totipotent cells. You could leave them alone to gestate into a single human life form... OR you could carefully separate them and create potentially hundreds of life forms.
So let's say that a scientist decides to create two humans from a collection of totipotent cells (otherwise he'd have left them to gestate into a single one). That means two "new people" would be generated instead of just one. And (in many senses) if the two people were generated, the one that would originally have grown would not. So how is "fertilization" (ie. the event that creates the collection of totipotent cells) responsible singly for any of these three potential lives?
