Pro-lifers argue that life begins at conception and ends at natural death. They argue that a fertilized egg is just as human as a three-year-old child. They argue that embryonic stem cell research, which could cure all kinds of diseases and save million of lives, is immoral because embryos are just as human as you or I. Embryos, they argue are different from other clumps of cells, because embryos are a human being. One professor takes these folks to task:
Thank you for responding to my letter, which took issue with points raised in your earlier NRO review of my book Challenging Nature. In your response, you continue to insist absolutely — as you have in numerous articles published on this topic — that a human embryo is a human being, while other clumps of human cells are something entirely different. Rather than continuing to debate this claim in prose, it is useful to take a more visual approach, as illustrated by comparing the two pictures below. Both show color-enhanced scanning electron micrographs of clumps of human cells. But before they were frozen for microscopy, one clump was a normal embryo, while the other was a bunch of embryonic stem cells. According to your logic, one clump was a human being, while the other was just a confined group of proteins, DNA, and other molecules. So tell me, Which one is which?
Can you tell?
The rest of the letter is fantastic. Silver writes,
I know this little exercise won’t change your mind; I present it simply for the benefit of more open-minded NRO readers. Indeed, it is pointless to debate scientific details when even simple words like “life” and “death” are interpreted by you in ways that are foreign to most practicing biologists. So instead, I would like to put to the test your ‘argument from authority’ claim, which holds that the embryo-is-a-human-being proposition “is a fact confirmed by contemporary embryology and attested to by the standard works in the field.” In fact, none of the standard texts you’ve quoted — or any other prominent biology textbook used at major nonsectarian universities — actually states that an “embryo” is a “human being?” (It won’t do to pretend that biologists use the term “human life” as a standard synonym for “human being.” Human cells growing and dividing indefinitely in petri dishes are fully alive — in biological terms — and fully human in their constituent parts, and yet you yourselves do not consider them to be human beings.)
Furthermore, if the embryo-is-a-human-being proposition really is “confirmed by contemporary embryology,” you might expect at least one of the 52 active professors in the two biology departments at the esteemed university where Professor George and I teach to acknowledge this supposedly confirmed “fact.” I challenge Professor George to identify one — just one — Princeton biology professor who shares this viewpoint. (As an incentive, if you can come up with one name, I will buy you both a case of wine from the same vineyard that produced the delightful bottle I shared with Professor George at a pleasant dinner some years ago.)
It’s important to emphasize just how thoroughly divorced from reality the anti-choice movement and radical right actually are. It permeates just about every one of their viewpoints: medical research, disease treatment, bodily autonomy, business regulation, environmental action, international policy, abortion, education. Somehow, the Republican party has morphed into a scientific laughingstock — they deny the scientific consensus on global warming; they claim life begins at conception when the medical definition is that it beings at implantation; they claim embryos are fully human, despite obvious evidence and the conclusions of biologists; they oppose teaching evolution, another scientific facts, in schools; they pass laws which require doctors to lie to women about the medical facts of abortion; they insist that contraception is an “abortifacient;” and on and on.
That fundamentalist world view is premised on the very idea that scientific and tangible facts don’t matter. What matters is “faith.” According to fundamentalists, there is one single truth, and that truth is delivered from God; no amount of reason or research or evidence can change The Truth.
As I stated in my previous letter, there is nothing — no fact or concept — that will ever make you budge from your belief in the unassailable truth of the view that an embryo is a human being. It is this form of absolutism that led me to brand you as fundamentalists, mocked in the title of your original book review. However, since I was not raised or educated in a strictly religious tradition, you could argue that I don’t really understand the difference between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists. But there’s no need to take my word for it because the self-described practicing-Catholic and conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan reaches exactly the same conclusion about Professor George in his hard-hitting new book, The Conservative Soul. According to Sullivan, George and others who hold his extreme views are fundamentalists. Sullivan explains that “the fundamentalist does not tolerate a diversity of views. There is one truth; and all other pretenders are threats to it, or contradict it . . . Fundamentalists assert a central core idea and then contort or distort reality in order to make it fit their model.” In a world where life and death become entirely divorced from any connection to modern biological understanding, only faith remains. It is faith of a particular type, not science, that drives the belief that the embryo shown in one of the pictures above is a human being, while the other object is not. This sort of faith is not amenable to debate, which is why this will be my final word on the subject.
Read the whole thing.