Bill Nye talks about the realities of reproduction, and the right wing completely loses its shit.
It is not Nye at his most eloquent, but…he’s actually right about everything important. Read this title for an example of the inanity of far right responses, titled WATCH: Bill Nye, Science Guy Makes An Idiot Of Himself On Reproduction. Nye is clearer and more correct than whoever wrote that, making it particularly amusing. It makes a lot of claims.
Not that this writer had all that great an affinity for Bill Nye anyway, but the video below has to be the most smug, snide, atheistic diatribe displaying outright willful ignorance and leftist talking points to grace youtube at least since Hillary Clinton talked about this subject.
No, no…that’s my schtick. How can you watch that video and come away thinking Nye’s attitude is offensive? Probably the same way one can watch it and think he got everything wrong.
Over at National Review, a trio of physicians pick apart the arguments using actual peer reviewed medical journal articles, but we can sum up what they have to say pretty easily.
When a single sperm fertilizes a human egg, the resulting zygote – the one cell being – has its own unique DNA.
Life begins for any one human being at that moment of conception when this fertilization occurs.
Errm, if you look at the National Review article (which I’ll return to shortly), it’s by two authors, a lawyer and a bioethicist at a Catholic university; there are several other articles by a Fellow of the Discovery Institute. This isn’t exactly a stellar, well-qualified lineup.
Their first point is a non sequitur. Fertilization produces a new unique genetic combination, but so what? This is the case in every organism — we don’t swoon in awe at the fact that fertilization in zebrafish produces a new combination of DNA. We don’t declare meiosis a privileged, protected state because it produces gametes with a unique set of genes. We don’t look at the immune system and decide that antibody producing cells are human beings because they reorganize their genomes into a unique arrangement during maturation.
Their second point is a standard elision: the process that will eventually produce a human being begins at fertilization, just like the process that will produce a chair begins when a tree is chopped down. We can apply the same adjective to both the tree and the chair — “wood” — but it doesn’t make them synonymous.
This is the pure science of when human life begins. It is true that not every time an egg is fertilized it implants, and babies are lost due to natural causes every day. This is called an act of God, or if one is not religious, Mother Nature. Mr. Nye’s statements on that topic calling for the prosecution of women whose fertilized eggs do not implant in the uterine wall are patently stupid on their face.
It’s a distortion and over-simplification of the “pure science”. When Nye talks about prosecuting women whose eggs fail to implant, he’s pointing out the fucking absurdity of such an argument, but if you’re going to call them patently stupid, say it to lawmakers in Indiana and Georgia and many other places that want to criminalize contraception. How can you not know that one of the grounds for hating some forms of contraception is the idea that they prevent implantation?
“You wouldn’t know how big a human egg is if it weren’t for microscopes.” Uh, Bill…the human ovum is the only sort of cell in a woman’s body that can be seen with the naked eye.
It is true we would not know the gory details of the beauty of human reproduction without medical doctors putting cameras in some pretty private parts of women, but that does not cancel out the actual science itself that tells us a human being is created at fertilization.
That was written by a guy who’s never had to find an ovum. They weren’t even discovered in mammals until the 1830s. Identifying one relatively large cell in a tissue populated with trillions of cells isn’t easy, and while mature follicles are even larger and easier to spot, it’s still non-trivial to identify them without some magnification. I’ve got slides of ovaries in my lab, all nicely stained to make it even easier, but still…a dot that’s only 100-150µm in diameter (a tenth of a millimeter) isn’t something you’ll be able to spot without a microscope.
Bill Nye might be a science guy (engineer, actually), but he’s no more an expert on human reproduction than Todd Akin is. What Nye is is a leftist tool who is spouting the feminist line that simplifies down to stupidity the excuses the left offers for why abortion should be tolerated in polite society, and why abstinence is undesirable as a way to prevent pregnancy when it is really 100% reliable as a way to do so. Without medical intervention, so far as we know, only one child was ever conceived without his mother knowing man. That has to say something for God.
At least we get an admission that Akin isn’t an expert on human reproduction! But the rest is an evasion. Why shouldn’t abortion be tolerated? He doesn’t say. And the reliability of not having sex to avoid pregnancy is not under debate; it’s that human beings are not reliably abstinent. We should endorse methods that allow people to be sexual beings without requiring them to be saddled with an unwanted pregnancy.
But let’s go to that National Review article with the over-hyped authorities. It’s not very good or convincing. The heart of their claim is that scientific publications acknowledge and justify that zygotes are human at fertilization.
All the texts used in contemporary human embryology and teratology, developmental biology, and anatomy concur in the judgment that it is at fertilization, not — as Nye ignorantly claims — at implantation, that the life of a new individual of the species Homo sapiens begins. Here are three of many, many examples:
“Human life begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.” “A zygote is the beginning of a new human being (i.e., an embryo).” (Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 7th edition. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 2003. pp. 16, 2.)
“Fertilization is the process by which male and female haploid gametes (sperm and egg) unite to produce a genetically distinct individual.” (Signorelli et al., Kinases, phosphatases and proteases during sperm capacitation, CELL TISSUE RES. 349(3):765, March 20, 2012.)
“Although life is a continuous process, fertilization (which, incidentally, is not a ‘moment’) is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte” (Emphasis added; Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Mueller, Human Embryology and Teratology, 3rd edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000, p. 8).
To which I can only say: NONSENSE. “Human” in these cases is a general descriptor for the origin of the cells; it’s a statement about the type. You might as well say that that one quote about a “male and female haploid gametes (sperm and egg)” clearly states that sperm and egg are human, therefore science says we ought to criminalize menstruation and masturbation.
One other point I have to make about their sources: the Moore and O’Rahilly texts are specifically medical embryology textbooks — they are not good sources for information about general developmental biology, and are a bit blinkered in their perspective, and tend to focus on superficial aspects of descriptive morphology. That’s fine for medical and nursing students, I suppose, but if you want to actually understand the mechanics of development, they’re useless. They’re doubly useless if you read them with an agenda that refuses to be budged by the facts.
I can troll the scientific literature, too. Here are some titles.
Pass F, Janis R, Marcus DM. (1971) Antigens of human wart tissue. J Invest Dermatol. 56(4):305-10.
Warts are human! Ban squaric acid, laser surgery, and topical liquid nitrogen treatments! (Warts actually are human: they are made of skin cells stimulated into benign overgrowth by incorporation of genetic material from a virus. They also therefore have a unique genetic combination.)
Kim HB, Lee SH, Um JH, Oh WK, Kim DW, Kang CD, Kim SH. (2015) Sensitization of multidrug-resistant human cancer cells to Hsp90 inhibitors by down-regulation of SIRT1. Oncotarget. 2015 Sep 25. [Epub ahead of print]
Cancer cells are human! They are also genetically distinct from their host, with a unique molecular signature. All the arguments used by these people denying Nye’s statements can also be applied to cancer.
Finch CE, Austad SN. (2015) Commentary: is Alzheimer’s disease uniquely human? Neurobiol Aging. 36(2):553-5.
Uh-oh. Scientists refer to diseases as “human”, too? Do we need to get informed consent and a signature from neurofibrillary plaques in the brain before we can try to treat it?
My point is not that warts, cancer, or diseases need to be regarded as persons. It’s that “human” is a very broad term that is applied to a lot of kinds of cells, and it takes a particularly naive person to browse through the literature and go “A-ha! My biases are confirmed by this quote!” We clearly have an understanding of the distinction between the general term “human” and “person deserving full civil rights and the protection of society”. If we didn’t, everyone would have to go around the house collecting shed skin flakes to give them a properly reverent burial.
And please, can this fascination with genetically unique combinations just curl up and die? It’s irrelevant and meaningless. A human being is not a cell or a listing of the nucleotide sequences of their genome. We leftist tools
have a deeper appreciation of the breadth and depth of experience and information that makes us fully human than “right-wing ignoramuses”, it seems.
Wait, what about the idiot from the Discovery Institute? What does he have to say? He’s ignorable. Well, so are the other babblers at the National Review, so I’ll just mention one thing. Wesley Smith says:
A sperm is a cell, it is alive but it isn’t a living organism. Ditto an egg.
Wha…? How does he define “organism”? That statement is so stupid it hurt to read it. I would like to see his definition, because it will require some twisty ad hoc bullshit to avoid being used to claim a zygote isn’t an “organism”.
Speaking of ignorable, one thing these critics ignore is women. Everything spins around how they can redefine terms, and how they can distort the scientific literature as an authority to back them up, but the primary argument for abortion is that women — human beings that we can not dispute are fully functional, aware members of society — must have autonomy and the right to control their bodies, and that society is better for everyone when women are respected as something more than baby-makers. They don’t even try to touch that point.
“the right wing completely loses its shit”, yet they are still full of it: you can’t explain that!
They are an eternal, unending font of shit. If only we had a way to tap that — infinite power!
Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!
It seems that I like him even more now than I did when I was a kid learning about science from his show.
What is it about failed implantation that makes right wingers come over all fatalistic like this? It’s just “god or mother nature”? So fucking what? Measles is natural. Heart disease in natural SIDS is natural. Yet we do our best to stop people from dying of all those causes. Small pox was natural before we put a lot of effort into destroying that natural and extremely common killer. If they really believed that fertilized eggs were babies they’d be screaming for funding to end this killer. The very fact that they’re not, that they’re willing to write down the death of up to 80% of “babies” (fertilized eggs) to “nature” and dismiss it, shows that either they don’t really believe that they’re babies or they don’t really think that babies are of any importance, or both.
BTW: Sorry about quoting the nut jobs in normal blockquotes. I haz a comic sans fail right now.
He’s not claiming a zygote isn’t an organism, he’s claiming a sperm cell (or an ovum) isn’t one.
It’s an attempt to head off the response that if anti-choicers are so sentimental about unique human cells, they should push to outlaw male masturbation.
Jesus these assholes make me tired. And I just woke up. THANKS PZ.
BTW, most, if not all, testicular cancer cells are totipotent. I say we bad treatment of testicular cancer first and then, if that works out well, consider banning abortion.
Last I checked, we mourn humans who die of natural causes, too. So why aren’t they mourning all the little innocent babbies lost to failure-to-implant? Those’re “one cell beings” with unique DNA! They’re human! Oh the humanity!
Every fucking cell in my body is technically “genetically unique”…these people know so little about biology that they imagine that after fertilization, every subsequent cell division produces completely identical copies of that special and unique new human genome, like it’s an identity, like it’s something fixed and permanent. It’s not, you fucking ignorant morons…and this is pretty fucking basic biology, it’s deeply embarrashing that you don’t know this, not that you care about your own ignorance, obviously.
And that’s just one extremely basic fact they’ve got absolutely wrong right at the beginning…i can’t even be bothered to read the rest, to be honest…
and water is wet. What else is new?
PZ @ #2
Sorry to shower on your dreams of power, but all you’ll get is infinite shit.
richardelguru @ #1
Uh-huh, God done it.
When a single sperm fertilizes a human egg, the resulting zygote – the one cell being – has its own unique DNA.
Same with a cancer!! Won’t someone think of the poor tumors?!?!
Funny thing, I recently argued with a secular forced birther who claimed the opposite: Implantation is the actual start so the failure rate of implantation doesn’t matter, after I pointed out that if abortion killed a baby because the only difference is time and nutrition then my daughter just chooped down a wood, aka ate some nuts.
I also have to disagree with Nye: I like abortions. They are wonderful things that save lives.
robo
And divine shits are infinite?
Okay, wait, wait…
If we for some reason accept the ‘person at fertilization’ argument, then any fertilized ovum that implants on a woman’s uterine wall without her consent is guilty of assault, yes?
Why are conservatives so soft on crime?
After posting I just thought that that explains why prayer never seems to be answered: the old G-man in on the can!
The wingnuts like to emphasize the “human”, and “life” aspects, without ever acknowledging that when the two words are combined, a separate recognition is required. Human Life, is much more than a few cells with the genome of human, being alive. I am biased to believe [see which word I used?], that human life requires cognition and experience.
Excuse me for giving priority to the complete person for control over their body, over a small mass of tissue floating within them. That mass of tissue may be living cells of a human genome variety, yet, I don;t think it qualifies for the status of Person (aka human life).
Which brings up another distinction I’d like to make: Human Life as a noun, versus Human Life as a verb. That is, being a living cell is the noun form, while people are basically the verb form of “human life”.
So, if a zygote splits, would these folks be completely okay if one of the twins was aborted, since half of the genetically identical cells would still continue to live and grow into the human it… erm… already was? And, if both were left to develop naturally, should they be considered the same human being because they are not genetically distinct from each other? If not, just when did they become two distinct individuals? I’m sure those folks spend just as much time on these questions as they do on their other biological research…
re “organism” definition.
sorry to commentpsplain to a biologist (when I ain’t one).
The concept of “organism” I was taught (in Bio101), is a collection of differentiated cells all working cooperatively to form a single entity. Which we call an organism, as those differentiated cells oftem cluster into “organs”.
I can also ‘understand’ the claim that sperm and ova are not (technically) alive, as living cells have the ability to spontaneously split into copies of themselves, and sperm and ova can not possibly do so until one of each merges to form a complete cell. Until they merge, the motion of the spermy’s tail is simply chemical process. (Just don’t tell me life is just chemical processes as well {that’s another can o worms}).
Fascinating (and ever-relevant) piece on the ahistoricity of pro-life thinking:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/18/the-biblical-view-thats-younger-than-the-happy-meal/
Eh, I’ve found the best arguments against Pro-Lifers don’t go after that whole nonsense. No one really thinks a microscopic bundle of cells is a human being. It’s a ridiculous proposition on its face.
All you have to do is prod them – just a bit – like asking them “well what is a woman supposed to do in such-and-such situation?” Because then they’ll tell you what a woman is supposed to do. In fact, I’ve found that they are more than willing to go on and on about what women are supposed to do, usually going further about what’s wrong with women today or something.
At least then you have an honest conversation.
Don’t you have to ignore the biology of bees to think the life of an organism begins at fertilization?
A useful definition for an intro human bio course maybe, but unfortunately excludes all single-celled “organisms”, who outnumber all us multicellular organisms many times over.
Actually, last I heard those single-celled organisms probably outnumber all the *cells* in multicellular organisms too… we’re doomed!
…well, unless we’ve switched definitions again, which does happen with some frequency as we try to categorize all this life stuff in some sensical way (Protista, anyone? XD)
@7 Lady Mondegreen — BINGO!! Why don’t Christian women name their miscarriages? Why don’t they hold funerals for their miscarriages? Why don’t they bury them in Sacred Ground. The American Catholic Church in its furthest right-wing dioceses started having a service for miscarriages, presumably to confront this exact same exposure of their hypocrisy. But nobody really took them up on it. They certainly didn’t invite friends and family and send a hearse to the graveyard and post obituaries in the local papers.
The technical term for a miscarriage is an “involuntary abortion”. If that is the death of a human life, then why don’t Republican families treat it that way, and go through all the same processes they would for a genuine human life, like, if their 4-year-old kid died???
Why don’t they name the foetus, for that matter. Why don’t they send out birth notices to all their loved ones the day the strip turns pink on the HPT? And shouldn’t the birthday be the backtracked estimate of the day of conception???
spontaneous abortion, not “involuntary”
Ah si, en Mexico es aborto involuntario. Mi equivocado.
It is even better than that, though – you would have to totally outlaw actually being either a male or female human being. No matter how much unprotected sex a woman might have, and no matter how reproductively fit she might be, it is inevitably the case that some of her eggs will never be fertilised, and that some of her embryos will either never implant or will suffer one form of spontaneous abortion or another. Equally, even if a man never masturbates and has sex as often as he is physically capable with fertile female partners, it is inevitable that at least some of his spermatozoa will be reabsorbed by his body – it is an unavoidable aspect of male reproductive physiology, and that doesn’t even take into account the possibility of premature ejaculation or wet dreams accounting for yet more of the little swimmers.
If one follows the forced birther ‘logic’ (such as it is) to its conclusion, the mere fact of being human at all makes you a murderer countless times over. We are all serial killers in the sick, twisted world of these idiots.
The moment you swallow a piece of food it becomes shit? I mean, essentially what they’re arguing for is the transubstantiation of actuality simply for having potentiality. So it stands to reason that they all eat shit. I was going to suggest they do that anyway.
doublereed
absolutely change the argument back to what they are really arguing about.
they are not out in front of clinics pleading that the babies be given to them. they are not pleading in congress for funds and programs to support all these babies whom the mothers do not want
in fact it is with difficulty we keep AFDC payments at sufficient levels. You know we must keep our fiscal house in order. you know balanced budgets, tax cuts, no new spending and a big military stuff like that
uncle frogy
@unclefrogy
Sadly, some of them are. They’re just lying.
slithey tove @ 19:
Well, in that case, a fair amount of the biomass of the planet would not be (technically) alive. All plants spend a portion of their life cycle in a multi-cellular haploid gametophyte form (see “alternation of generations”), and for mosses, this is the larger, more visible form. And, yes, all life is simply chemical process. IMHO (as a biologist), it is the denial of such clear facts of biology that turns cans of
spermsworms into a problem when they are inevitably opened.But all this nonsense about biology is a red herring anyway, even for the religious. What they really hate is the idea that human beings (especially women) would dare “play God” by making use of the tools that human intelligence and science have provided, to take control of any aspect of their lives. That’s what religion is about: keeping all those cans well sealed, and reserving all legitimate thought to the supernatural non-evolved intelligence that, according to their fantasies, made everything, does everything, and whispered it all into the ears of His very pious spokespeople who would never themselves commit the blasphemy of permitting a product of mere human thought to be considered worthy of action.
So don’t expect them to be consistent, or to have thought anything through (including the question of whether haploid organisms are “alive”). It doesn’t matter, and they don’t care, as long as you (women) do as you’re told.
#19: NO, on all counts. Bacteria are also organisms; they’re single-celled.
There are organisms that carry out multiple cell divisions while haploid. Our gametes are just so specialized that they don’t.
Your definition would imply that multicellular animals and plants are either not organisms or not alive, it’s unclear which. The operation of your brain is also a mechanical and chemical process, so therefore it’s technically not really alive?
richardelguru — Yes, and eternally…
I really think the religious choose conception as the start of “life” so they can both try to shame women who decide to control whether they continue to be pregnant or not at the same time they shame women who let one of their ovum survive by getting pregnant without being married.
Everyone’s already pointed out the best absurdities with the “zygotes are people” claim, so I’ll just add this one:
United States law states unequivocally that regardless of when a human life begins, no one can be a US citizen until birth. As such, any zygote, embryo, or fetus in the United States is an illegal alien which is literally sucking nutrients out of an American woman.
Of course, pointing out the absurdities in thinking a zygote is a person won’t do any good because we’re debunking a claim no one actually believes. Anti-choicers believe that women are property and their bodies should be controlled by male “owners.” The idea that a zygote is a “baby” deserving protection is the transparently flimsy cover story they came up with because their actual beliefs are too repugnant to say outright.
Although it is never stated by the anti-choicers, I often get the feeling that they hold the developmental stages (blastocyst, embryo, and fetus) in such high regards because of it’s potential to create a new person, but they erroneously equate potential with certainty (unless god or mother nature step in). Not to mention that human totipotent cells in the right environment would also carry this potential, so potential is not everything.
Even as the developing fetus comes closer to fulfilling this potential and may become viable outside of the womb, the women’s bodily autonomy and health should still take precedence and the decision to carry the fetus to term should be up to her and her doctor.
I had never heard of the bodily autonomy argument until I read it hear, and I actually think that is the stronger argument to make compared to the biological argument. AFAIK there is no bright biological line to say when a fetus is viable outside the womb (the closest may be when a women’s water breaks in most circumstances) and should have it’s own rights to autonomy. Whereas the fetuses bodily autonomy will only equal the women’s bodily autonomy around the time of it’s birth (and definitely after it’s birth)
Actually, the fallacy that the anti-choice fuckwits pretend is that women get pregnant, and want to wait until the last minute to abort the fetus.
Third trimester abortions consist of induced early birth, for fetal deformities, or to save the life of the mother. The fact that they offer zero help to a woman who does give birth to baby with deformities/special needs says all you need to know about their intentions and hypocrisy.
parasiteboy
They usually simply deny the “possibility aspect”, claiming that with the merging of sperm and ovum the new human being is “complete”.
The argument goes like this: There is no fundamental difference between a baby, a school kid and an adult except time and size*. Therefore there is also no fundamental difference between a blastocyte, an embryo, a fetus and a baby. Given time and the reight conditions, a blastocyte will become a baby just like a baby will become an adult. Therefore a blastocyte is already a complete person and deserves protection.
Therefore eating nuts should be subject to the same regulations and restrictions as chopping down woods.
You may also notice who vanishes completely from the discussion: the pregnant person.
*Now, of course we know that this is not true. Because of the fundamental differences between children and adults they have different rights and duties and neither of them has a right to access your body.
I was reading through a gynecology textbook the other day, and, wow, there are some pretty serious physiological changes that happen to pregnant bodies. The heart and lungs change shape to keep up with supplying blood to the fetus, the changes to metabolism can result in gestational diabetes, not to mention things like pre-eclampsia that will kill you.
So, beyond the question of whether humanness begins at zygote or blastocyst or heartbeat or pain awareness or birth… pregnancy permanently alters a person and can be deadly, and is definitely going to affect your day-to-day life with nausea or having to pee constantly or gaining weight, etc. Forcing someone to go through that… No. You just can’t.