When does human life begin?

[Valka D'Ur]

Not as big an effect:

Spoiler Legend :

Annual mortality of Canadian birds due to human activities (log-scale). Panel A shows stage-specific estimates for each activity, according to whether entire nests, single eggs/nestlings, or mobile individuals were killed, as in original papers and reports. Values include both means and medians, and error bars represent both confidence limits (90% or 95%) and maximum/minimum ranges, as originally presented. Panel B shows converted mortality estimates for each activity (median with 90% confidence limits), where stage-specific kill totals have been converted to the equivalent number of potential adult breeders based on a stochastic model incorporating species-composition and demography. Hollow symbols indicate mortality only estimated for part of Canada or for a limited number of species, and thus where total Canada-wide cross-taxa mortality is likely much higher than these estimates. Panel C shows these same converted estimates (median with 90% confidence limits), pooled across related activities (cats: feral and pet; transportation: vehicle-collisions, road maintenance, and chronic ship-source oil; buildings: collisions with all 3 types; power: transmission-line collisions, hydro reservoirs, electrocutions, transmission-line maintenance, and wind energy; agriculture: haying and pesticides; harvest: migratory and nonmigratory birds; fisheries: all gear types; oil and gas: all terrestrial and marine sources; mining: both pits/quarries and metals/minerals), as well as the original single-source values for forestry and communication towers. Values in all panels are ranked in descending order according to the converted kill totals. See text and Appendix 2 for citations of papers and reports used as data sources.

Source: A Synthesis of Human-related Avian Mortality in Canada

My point is that some people treat cats as the only way birds die. While some cats do kill birds, not all do. My own cats had a variety of outlooks on being predators. Two of the female cats killed and ate the birds they killed (one had just had kittens under the back porch and she wasn't yet tamed and adopted). One of my male cats enthusiastically took to killing mice, after 6 years of not having a clue; since he killed the ones in the house, I wholly approved of that and always praised him.

Then... there was my Gussy. Imagine a sweet, cuddly grey tuxedo cat who was a feral kitten living with the squirrels in the crabapple tree before my dad and I caught him. Gussy wasn't with his biological mother long enough to learn anything about hunting, and when he seemed to suddenly realize, "I'm a cat. I should kill things"... his first attempt at killing something was a bee.

The bee wasn't happy about this and stung him. Gussy's paw swelled up and I had to run to the public library to look up whether cats can be allergic to bee venom (they can). Thankfully Gussy wasn't.

He'd learned his lesson about predation. A couple of weeks later I heard odd sounds coming from the kitchen in the middle of the night, so I got up and went to see what was going on.

It was a battle to end all battles. Gussy pounced, played with his prey, let it go, and pounced again. He was ferocious and relentless.

















And when he was done, it was obvious that his prey had never had a chance. That French fry was well and truly dead.

 

[Samson]

I've been saying for a long, long time that a scratched skin cell is a human life and is a potential person. This means that there's a complete difference between killing a potential person and a person.

Chemical reprogramming of human somatic cells to pluripotent stem cells
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04593-5



Now, I'll grant that this isn't 'definitive proof' you can bathe a skin cell in nutrients to make it into a person ... but I also don't want us to do that experiment. The TL;DR is that 'potential person' doesn't mean what people think it means, or else every scratched itch is a genocide.

But would that make a new person, or a single person with multiple bodies? I reference the news today that the single largest organism in the world has been identified by genetic testing:

Beeb:

The largest known plant on Earth - a seagrass roughly three times the size of Manhattan - has been discovered off the coast of Australia.
Using genetic testing, scientists have determined a large underwater meadow in Western Australia is in fact one plant.
​

Paper:

Our genomic and cytogenetic assessments of 10 meadows identified geographically restricted, diploid clones (2n = 20) in a single location, and a single widespread, high-heterozygosity, polyploid clone (2n = 40) in all other locations. The polyploid clone spanned at least 180 km, making it the largest known example of a clone in any environment on earth.

[Seagrasses] reproduce sexually through flowering and seed production, and clonally through vegetative growth via horizontal rhizome extension.
​

So if they are all one organism because they have formed by asexual reproduction and have the same[ish] genome, so what would that say about human clones? Back to my point, human life started ~300k years ago and ever since there have only been branching events.

 

[EnglishEdward]

The largest known plant on Earth - a seagrass roughly three times the size of Manhattan - has been discovered off the coast of Australia.
Using genetic testing, scientists have determined a large underwater meadow in Western Australia is in fact one plant.

The BBC is getting sloppy. One sentence says it is off the coast. The second sentence contradicts that saying it is in Western Australia.

 

[Gorbles]

If you can't work out that by that they mean "the coast of Western Australia", I'd humbly suggest you're looking for problems in the first place.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Noticing sloppiness by a service provider I pay for is not the same as looking for problems.

 

[Arwon]

It's in Western Australia, and off the coast. Shark Bay is an internal waterway, and we are even talking extremely shallow waters.

Note the local experts the ABC also describing it as in WA. What a bizarre bit of erroneous nitpicking lol.

 

[Arwon]

Also pet cats should absolutely be kept exclusively indoors/on premises in European settler colonial contexts, their level of predation of small animals (not just birds but also reptiles, amphibians and marsupials) with no evolutionary defence to a perfect old world predator is a disaster.

The ACT is expanding our cat containment laws from July this year, from a few suburbs to the entire Territory, and rightly so. Technically our two monsters would be grandfathered as not requiring containment, but we live in an apartment in a high traffic area so they're purely indoors anyway.

 

[El_Machinae]

Just don't ask about euthanizing strays in those colonizing regions.

 

[Arwon]

Tends to be patchy.

Killing ferals ie fully unsocialised and wild bush cats is common, there's poison programs where practical without harming native animals, shooting is allowed, etc. Putting a dent in the millions of them looks... challenging.

But urban strays (socialised unowned or semi owned), are probably a lower level issue than ferals and there's mostly nobody catching them except volunteers who mostly don't kill but instead try to foster and rehome, or to neuter and release if they can't be socialised.

The issue is probably more intense here than in other cities because we're the Bush Capital and as a newer and less intensely urban city there's still a lot of native wildlife right in and around the city itself. Most places in Canberra are an urban-nature interface when kangaroos come right up to the parliamentary lawns.

Part of the dilemma here is a lack of actual resourcing to more proactively catch such urban unowned populations in the first place, much less decide how to proceed from there. As far as I know there aren't really state agencies doing it.

Having owners keep their own cats from adding pressure to urban natives helps over all, but it isn't the whole issue.

 

[Gorbles]

Noticing sloppiness by a service provider I pay for is not the same as looking for problems.

Your ISP is a service provider (literally by definition). The BBC is state-funded, which means at the taxpayer's expense, but not something you explicitly pay for. You pay taxes, and these are allocated by the government. If you mean the TV license, I'd imagine you can consume online journalism by the Beeb without having one, as that only applies to broadcasted channels and iPlayer.

But this is all very off-topic, being what Arwon rightly points out is nitpicking.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Your ISP is a service provider (literally by definition).

I wasn't typing about my ISP.

The BBC is state-funded, which means at the taxpayer's expense, but not something you explicitly pay for.

Absolutely Wrong.

The great majority of the BBC's funding is not from the state via taxes.
I live in England and I pay for a TV License; so I explicitly pay for BBC services.

Any chance of commenting on the topic, the article itself;
rather than incorrectly nit picking on my comments.

 

[Gorbles]

I wasn't typing about my ISP.

Didn't say you were, it was an example of an actual service provider.

Absolutely Wrong.

The great majority of the BBC's funding is not from the state via taxes.
I live in England and I pay for a TV License; so I explicitly pay for BBC services.

Absolutely wrong. As I literally just said, the TV license doesn't cover the online news (much like it doesn't cover radio). The TV license pays for the broadcasted channels, both terrestrial and digital (which is why iPlayer requires a license too).

Turns out both my memory and my Googling were wrong! The BBC is funded mainly by the license fee (around 76% according to figures available on the BBC website), however it is categorised as a tax, if you are keen on the accuracy of words being discussed.

Any chance of commenting on the topic, the article itself;
rather than incorrectly nit picking on my comments.

I'm commenting on nitpicking, so we're both commenting on nitpicking But you're right, so feel free to PM me if you want to discuss why you think I'm wrong further.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Yes, correct. But the government forbidding cloning is going to be very different from government restricting a woman's ability to reproduce. They're similar, but at very dissimilar intensities of intrusion. Cloning an embryo is similar to IVT, but also quantifiably different

i'm not sure the difference has actually been quantified, beyond the tech requirement you highlight below.

Well, it's clear enough given the outcomes in animal experiments. Unfortunately, to get a clone that's 'acceptable', we would have to create ones that suffered unnecessary deficits while building up and testing the technology. The embargo is mostly due to the process of getting there, less the destination. Of course, evil jurisdictions will still do it and perfect the technology, so we will eventually have to decide if it was merely the process of learning to clone people that prevents us from cloning people.

i was going under the hypothetical that cloning someone successfully was something that could be reasonably anticipated (similar likelihood of complications as typical births, noting that those are non-trivial as well)

That is why I took pains to distinguish it, so that it wasn't extended.

again, i'm not convinced the intensities of intrusion are that different. i guess it depends how much effort it would require to stop someone from deciding they want to clone themselves and do it w/o too much outside assistance, and what policies are used to stop women's reproductive rights similarly. you could for example get very similar levels of intrusion by doing something like fining having children heavily (like china did but more so).

 

[El_Machinae]

i'm not sure the difference has actually been quantified, beyond the tech requirement you highlight below.

The difference is that the law has a very easy time banning one without banning the other, even if the two techniques are similar. The fact that the technologies are similar means very little, because 'cloning' is different from regular IVF in quantifiable ways.

Feeding bleach to my baby is basically the same technology as feeding him formula. Despite this, the law has a very easy time banning the one without affecting the other.

Edit: once the psychopathic institutions develop the technology enough to make it into the mainstream, I would bet that Canada would eventually allow it under our Freedom of Expression charter right

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The difference is that the law has a very easy time banning one without banning the other, even if the two techniques are similar.

sure, you can do it legally. in the same sense that "legally", you could allow only men to vote. that's a thing that was possible under the law. any particular thing that is distinct from something else could technically be banned without banning the other thing, legally.

i was more interested in the justification for it, though. not the practical reality that law can be and frequently has been arbitrary. for argumentative purposes, my intention was to demonstrate that such policy would be arbitrary, not to pretend that the law wouldn't implement arbitrary policy.

Feeding bleach to my baby is basically the same technology as feeding him formula.

the outcomes/harms between these two is much larger/actually tangible, compared to preventing otherwise easily-accessible cloning vs ivf. to the extent that one is captured by more generalized law against harming other people.

i don't necessarily share your anticipation of how canada would act with it. though almost anything is better than "the government decides what traits new people will have" in a scenario where granular control is possible. that's a game over scenario.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, if we go back, the original position is that disallowing cloning infringes on fewer civil liberties than banning a woman from breeding. I guess I was imagining vat-grown children, or somesuch, but even without that it's obviously true since "preventing a woman from carrying a clone" is going to be a subset of "preventing a woman from getting impregnated".

Most of the modern hesitation will be the concern for the well-being of the infant, which is a valid concern ... until it isn't. Like, the technology will create victims until its perfected and then after that happens, the discussion changes. We've 'assumed away' that concern, even if it's legitimate.

The 2nd concern will be the squick factor, I bet. That's a strong one.

I guess there will be an equity concern where creating babies with 'advantages' is 'wrong'. That will be the Naturalistic Fallacy. But, since it's going to be argued on aggregate data using socioeconomic identifiers, I guess I can just artificially cripple every second kid in order to sure the average becomes the natural 'baseline'. I'm kidding of course.

But it does mean that people will be struggling with a heuristic, where 'adding an advantage' isn't just the same as 'removing a disadvantage' with different packaging. At the individual level, it would be terrible if we didn't let parents give their child every advantage they think is best, though I'd not mind having some wiggle room so the kids can eventually sue their parents for being terrible parents.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

We've 'assumed away' that concern, even if it's legitimate.

of course, mostly because we share the concern and it functionally ends anything interesting about the discussion. thus we work with the hypothetical, regardless of how realistic it is to expect it any time soon.

But, since it's going to be argued on aggregate data using socioeconomic identifiers, I guess I can just artificially cripple every second kid in order to sure the average becomes the natural 'baseline'. I'm kidding of course.

lol. though sadly i think people unironically make such a case in different contexts, unfortunately.

But it does mean that people will be struggling with a heuristic, where 'adding an advantage' isn't just the same as 'removing a disadvantage' with different packaging.

this seems like it might be an especially hard line to draw in terms of things along a scale, such as intelligence (along its quantifiable measures anyway) or physical strength. avoiding someone being unusually weak vs making someone physically far stronger than average in terms of how easily they get/retain muscle mass are along the same scale. if you make a rule that adding too much is bad, ideally there'd be some reason why. maybe it will be convenient (too much muscle mass this way is a health risk or something), but i doubt that will be *consistently* true.

or maybe every single child winds up being 80 points of iq higher than their parents or something. what does that world look like? maybe they could explain it in a way i can understand when they grow up, lol.

 

[Samson]

I'd not mind having some wiggle room so the kids can eventually sue their parents for being terrible parents

How terrible must they be?

A 27-year-old Indian man plans to sue his parents for giving birth to him without his consent.
Mumbai businessman Raphael Samuel told the BBC that it's wrong to bring children into the world because they then have to put up with lifelong suffering.​

 

[Farm Boy]

If we can make a prison state out of weed because we think it's socially disruptive, we can murder test tube humans just like the ones that have downs for the same disruptive tendency. I'd at least listen.

 

[El_Machinae]

How terrible must they be?

A 27-year-old Indian man plans to sue his parents for giving birth to him without his consent.
Mumbai businessman Raphael Samuel told the BBC that it's wrong to bring children into the world because they then have to put up with lifelong suffering.​

I think that that fact that we're not allowed to hold our parents strongly accountable for our existence is a social norm, and not entirely philosophically sound. Like, a society where an 18 year old can take all their parents' stuff (including their organs) might either shrink into zero or be composed mostly of people who were glad they were born.