Are embryos human???

[Hibiscus]

Some think they are, some dont. According to classical philosophers, an entity can only be defined by what it is to become, so therefore embryos are human.

 

As part of my dissertation, I am analysing peoples ideas with regards to this, and I am desperately in need of volunteers to fill in a QUICK questionnaire about this. So, if you can very kindly spare a couple of minutes of your precious lives, please email me on stem.cells07@googlemail.com and I will send you a copy to fill out.

 

 

I thank all you kind folks in advanced (do i sound patronising?? not intended : ))

[Phi for All]

I deleted the duplicate thread you had in Genetics. We don't want two sets of responses.

Some think they are, some dont. According to classical philosophers, an entity can only be defined by what it is to become, so therefore embryos are human.

Are you making this conclusion before your analysis? Why are you lending more weight to one side of the argument?

As part of my dissertation, I am analysing peoples ideas with regards to this, and I am desperately in need of volunteers to fill in a QUICK questionnaire about this. So, if you can very kindly spare a couple of minutes of your precious lives, please email me on stem.cells07@googlemail.com and I will send you a copy to fill out.

I would recommend you post your questionnaire online somewhere so people can fill it out and save it. Many people won't send emails to throwaway accounts for fear of spam attacks.

I thank all you kind folks in advanced (do i sound patronising?? not intended : ))

So, if you can very kindly spare a couple of minutes of your precious lives....

The "precious lives" part sounded very sarcastic and patronizing, like my "precious life" can't compare in importance with this questionnaire.

[Glider]

Some think they are, some dont. According to classical philosophers, an entity can only be defined by what it is to become, so therefore embryos are human.

Are embryos human? That's a very strange question.

 

Human embryos are human. Chicken embryos aren't. Nor are cat, horse, shark, hamster or camel embryos, nor any other embryo that isn't human.

 

If your questionnaire is phrased the same way, you'll probably find that everybody considers a human embryo human. It's what differentiates human embryos from embryos of other species.

 

Whether or not they consider a human embryo a human being is an entirely different question.

 

As part of my dissertation, I am analysing peoples ideas with regards to this, and I am desperately in need of volunteers to fill in a QUICK questionnaire about this. So, if you can very kindly spare a couple of minutes of your precious lives, please email me on stem.cells07@googlemail.com and I will send you a copy to fill out.

I agree with Phi. You'd get a much better response rate if you were to post your questionnaire online (include a link to it).

 

 

I thank all you kind folks in advanced (do i sound patronising?? not intended : ))

As Phi indicates, you do sound a bit sarcastic, and if you thought that might have been the case, it may have been wise to adjust your phrasing.

 

Remember, you are trying to attract respondents. You are asking them to give you some of their 'precious lives' for nothing more than good will. It would serve you better to generate some good will to begin with.

[Taq_is_hot]

I say they are indeed human. I honestly don't see how they couldn't be. They are going to turn into a human no matter what, so they are human, regardless of how "young" they are.

[foursixand2]

Of coarse they are human. But they have no concept of themselves in the way you do. They lead a completely alien existence. No more or less special than the existence we lead. And an egg is a chicken. Im sure enjoy your delicious over easy aborted chicken fetus. I know i do. You think there is something more holy about a human fetus vs chicken?

I can infact conclude the negative, using the same basic premise that would exalt a human fetus. Taking evolution into account, it is entirely possible that the descendants of chickens are destined to achieve an intelligence that surpasses that of our own. They will find our fossils and film a documentary for Chicken Discovery Channel, about a failed civilization of sentient apes. Perhaps we will be considered the SECOND most advanced civilization. Our brains crossed the threshold of consciousness but we bloomed too fast and destroyed ourselves before we were evolved enough to create a stable social structure.

 

So if our status is interchanged with the chicken, it is in fact a much greater sin to consume the fetus of a chicken. For its descendants ten times more intelligent than ours, this is what it is destined to become so therefore it IS.

There is no logical reason to draw the line at a modern fetus. The modern chicken fetus is the fetus to the fetus to the fetus to the fetus to the fetus (etc) of the future chicken. The modern chicken IS the future chicken.

 

It is silly, but absolutely logical. Going back far enough our ancestors were rodents, going back farther we were fish, or back to cyanobacteria. How much remorse do you feel for the death of a mouse, or a fish (or their fetuses), of a colony of bacteria? And yet they became us, so they were us . . . . just not yet.

[Lilian]

And an egg is a chicken. Im sure enjoy your delicious over easy aborted chicken fetus. I know i do. You think there is something more holy about a human fetus vs chicken?

 

Most eggs we eat are unfertilised (battery hen eggs anyway, since there are no roosters around).

 

I wish I'd known this fact when I was 7, and I attempted to incubate a chicken's egg from the supermarket by carefully placing it my bed with my electric blanket on and a thermometer hanging out under my sheets. Sadly, the egg never hatched, but started to rot after a week, much to my dismay.

 

So I can (almost) safely say that since most eggs we buy from supermarkets are unfertilised, I can eat eggs with very little guilt, as it is simply a chicken's gamete - just a sex cell with the haploid number of chromosones, and thus cannot be considered a life.

[Zaire]

are human embryos human beings? obviously this stems from stem cell research (no pun intended) a controversial issue. a factor seemingly never touched on is the philosophy that diseases and sickness are nature's way of limiting overpopulation, so should we take life away from a living breathing fetus to possibly help an elderly citizen, and thus disrupt the cycle of life?

[iNow]

We disrupt "the cycle of life" all of the time. If this is your logic, then there are all manner of other things we should avoid, but don't.

[foodchain]

We disrupt "the cycle of life" all of the time. If this is your logic, then there are all manner of other things we should avoid, but don't.

 

 

I agree with you. Going from the above on the subject the only way you can conclude anything about life is simply from the study of it. So thusly it would seem to understand issues like evolution down to the daily grind of a species would require a vast amount of ecological understanding in total speak on really, and thusly you find that draws down to even a molecular level, so you would have to have I guess then the molecular basis of life needing to be solved for as it would relate to daily behavior of a species from an individual and on up scope of detail.

 

I just don’t think such exists right now fully to use in definition in conjunction to the ability to speak on if embryos are human over environmental impact.

[SkepticLance]

Ultimately this is a question of semantics. What you are asking is : what is your definition of human?

 

Whether people consider an embryo to be human depends on their personal definition. However, here is my personal input.

 

If you use the 'potential human' definition, then a drop of my spilled blood is human, since it contains cells with all 23 pairs of chromosomes, and could in theory (in practise in 100 years) be cloned to make another human. My drop of blood is thus a potential human.

 

This is clearly silly. My own personal definition of human depends on mentality. A human is an organism that thinks like a human. By this definition, an embryo is not. A supercomputer that has a human's personality downloaded into it would be regarded as human.

[Sisyphus]

I agree with Glider that the question is poorly phrased. Yes, of course it's human. It's a human embryo. And when I cut myself I lose human blood, and if I develop a tumor it will be made of human cancer cells.

 

But is it a human being? No, not especially. I don't mean that flippantly, it really is a gray area. To us, the status of human being obviously carries a lot of weight, and it is considered special because of (and is defined by) many unique traits, none of which are really shared by an embryo. A human embryo taken in itself is not fundamentally different from any other embryo, which is to say it is a blob of tissue acting as a parasite. That "it will become" a human is true in a sense, but the same can be said of the pre-conception egg and sperm considered together, or of the food the mother eats and whose mass will be incorporated into the embryo. Life is a continuous process, and does not lend itself to strict boundaries.

[carol]

And an egg is a chicken. Im sure enjoy your delicious over easy aborted chicken fetus. I know i do. You think there is something more holy about a human fetus vs chicken?

 

The chicken's egg that we eat is unfertilized, so you can't call it an aborted chicken fetus.

 

But we enjoy 18-day old duck's eggs. its a street food in our country.

 

going back to the question, i would consider a human embryo a human. it's not just any other embryo and it would eventually lead to an adult human.

[CharonY]

going back to the question, i would consider a human embryo a human. it's not just any other embryo and it would eventually lead to an adult human.

 

Actually I would rephrase it to:"it could eventually lead to an adult human."

While we would like to perceive biological processes in a fixed, mechanistic way, what is actually happening depends on a lot of things strangely not going wrong.

[foursixand2]

Most eggs we eat are unfertilised (battery hen eggs anyway, since there are no roosters around).

 

I wish I'd known this fact when I was 7, and I attempted to incubate a chicken's egg from the supermarket by carefully placing it my bed with my electric blanket on and a thermometer hanging out under my sheets. Sadly, the egg never hatched, but started to rot after a week, much to my dismay.

 

So I can (almost) safely say that since most eggs we buy from supermarkets are unfertilised, I can eat eggs with very little guilt, as it is simply a chicken's gamete - just a sex cell with the haploid number of chromosones, and thus cannot be considered a life.

 

i stand corrected. rendering my analogy quite poor. the examples of SkepticLance and Sisyphus stand as much more effective conveyors of the basic point i intended.

[Glider]

going back to the question, i would consider a human embryo a human. it's not just any other embryo and it would eventually lead to an adult human.

This is where most of these debates go wrong. That was not the original question. You added an 'a'.

 

The difference between the questions "Is a human embryo human?" and "Is a human embryo a human?" is profound. They are entirely different questions.

[CharonY]

Ouch. overlooked that part.

[foursixand2]

This is where most of these debates go wrong. That was not the original question. You added an 'a'.

 

The difference between the questions "Is a human embryo human?" and "Is a human embryo a human?" is profound. They are entirely different questions.

 

agree and disagree. As far as logic goes they are the same. The difference is in the intention of the asked question. The latter was probably asked by someone who is considering souls and like nonsense. They mean, is the embryo of a human comparable to a born human? As far as cold science is concerned, and putting asside silly ideas that a human is more than its physical body, the answer is obviously no.

 

The literal answer to both Gliders questions is yes. It is most certainly the exact same creature. Only taking account of the probable unspoken superstitions of the asker of question two, does its answer become no. The mentality of an embyo is nothing like the mentality of a born human. You would not be able to have any form of conversation with an embryo of your own species. Nor would it be able to convey any of its knowledge to you. (knowledge here defined as physical electrical patterns of the brain)

 

In fact information exchange can essentially only occur between born creatures (obviously). You are therefore more capable of being able to relate to, and thus communicate at some level with a born creature of a different species than the unborn of your own (or any other). Even if that communication is as simple as interacting with say a mouse ('i have a morsel of cheese to feed you' or 'i have a boot with which to squash you') it is more communication than you would achieve with any type of fetus.

 

the respective worlds of the born and the unborn are utterly alien to one another.

[Zaire]

i mean the natural cycle of life, as it would be in the absence of humans. there isnt really much we should avoid when considering that...

[DrDNA]

Hmmmm......it occurred to me that you MIGHT be asking if embryos have souls.

 

If so, a more philosophical type thread might be more appropriate. And an intreging question it be.......along with what is a soul of course.....and that MIGHT make it out of bounds as a topic.....

 

If not, never mind

 

In either case, good luck.