Prof: We'll start a
little slow because I'm sure
some people are coming.
 
This--we'll continue with
abortion, we had two lectures
ago we talked about abortion.
 
The center of the abortion
debate is 'when does life
begin,' and luckily that's a
question that biology can say
something about.
 
What statement is the most
common statement made on this?
Not your own personal opinion
and not an educated opinion,
but what do people on the
street say mostly about when
life begins?
 
What do you hear?
 
Prof: What?
 
Student:  At conception.
 
Prof: At conception and--
all right, yes indeed,
that's the most common sort of
thing that people say,
life begins at conception.
 
This is in the newspapers,
this is common and this is in
all the media.
 
So George Will--how many of you
heard of George Will,
a famous Washington
correspondent.
He's syndicated like
everywhere: "It is a
biological fact,
not a theological postulate,
that such life is a continuum
from conception to death."
Then just before I was writing
this lecture the first time,
I was scanning The New York
Times, as I always do,
and there was a letter from the
editor--
letter to the editor from a
pro-life writer.
"It is a scientific fact,
as any basic biology text will
confirm that life does begin at
conception.
The fetus is a live human
being, distinct from,
while dependent on,
its mother.
It deserves the full protection
of its rights."
That's what's common out there.
 
Not only is it what people,
most people personally believe,
but it's generally considered
to be a scientific fact.
I've heard this from prolife
people and prochoice people,
almost indistinguishably.
 
The question is--you've all had
high school biology at least,
how many of you had college
biology?
A few of you, guess what?
 
That isn't what--that isn't at
all what a beginning biology
textbook says.
 
What does it say?
 
This is from--they send
professors free copies of
textbooks,
so I just opened up one that
they happened to send me,
and it shows something quite
different.
 
It shows life as a cycle.
 
There's no start point here.
 
Fertilization is one of the
events going around the cycle.
This is the essence of sexual
reproduction.
We also know that there's
asexual reproduction,
which doesn't have this stuff
at all.
The cycle is the switch between
a haploid genome,
which means one copy of each
chromosome,
and diploid,
when each cell has two copies
of each chromosome.
 
With sexual
reproduction--there's always
some version of this one
copy/two copies cycle.
When we look in detail,
this again from the same
freshman, very popular,
very big selling freshman
college biology text.
 
It talks about three different
sexual lifecycles.
In--the one that you're most
familiar with,
which is animals.
 
What happens is you start with
a--a multi-cellular organism,
that's you.
 
Then meiosis--the splitting of
the chromosomes so that the
gametes get--
this is 2N, N being the number
of chromosomes,
start from 2N,
there's a process called
meiosis in which pairs split and
you get cells with only one copy
of each chromosome,
those are called gametes or
germ cells,
and then from another
individual you get a second N
and you go back to the diploid
phase.
It's again, this cycling around
between one copy and two copies
of the chromosomes,
meiosis and fertilization.
Now in most animals it happens
that the big stage,
like us, is diploid,
but that is not a universal
rule at all.
 
Here is a stage which is--are
fungi and some algae that have
it the other way around.
 
They go through the same cycle
but now the big organism is the
haploid stage,
where there's only one copy of
each chromosome and that's
growing in your garden,
there will be a lot of stuff
like this.
In most plants,
and some algae,
you have a third possibility,
whereas, both are
multi-cellular organisms.
 
There's the diploid stage
multi-cellular and the haploid
stage is multi-cellular,
and the cycle goes around.
The basic idea is not that
there's a beginning but that
life is a cycle.
 
This is what--I don't know what
your high school textbook
says--I was afraid to go look at
high school textbooks.
My colleagues who read high
school textbooks are always
horrified, so I didn't go lower
than a college--a standard
college textbook.
 
Again, this is not the only
mechanism of reproduction,
there's of course a whole
variety of asexual means of
reproduction.
 
What kinds of things reproduce
asexually with none of this?
Bacteria, yeast,
yeast that makes your bread
rise, yeast that makes your
beer, yeast that ferments your
wine, and yeast is fungi between
your toes.
They reproduce by?
 
What's the mechanism of their
reproduction?
Budding, they bud off, mitosis.
 
What else, what grows in your
garden that you eat many
mornings?
 
Strawberries,
how do strawberries reproduce?
Oh my, you are disconnected
from nature.
Strawberries--none of you have
strawberries in your garden or
in your backyard?
 
Do you know--who has a garden?
 
Student:  I don't know
how they grow.
Prof: What?
 
Student:  I have but I
don't know how they grow.
Prof: She strawberries
don't know--
they have runners,
they have what's called
rhizomes,
they're called runners and you
have one plant and when it gets
big enough and has enough energy
it sends out a runner that grows
a root,
and it grows up a strawberry,
and then it doesn't matter
whether the runner is eventually
cut.
Lots and lots of things grow by
runners, which is again,
another asexual form of
reproduction.
Again, since you don't have
yards--so pricker bushes,
the bane in the northeast,
how do pricker bushes grow?
Runners, that's why your garden
gets just overtaken,
if you don't get your clippers
out and be very brutal,
your garden just is overtaken
by pricker bush;
bracken is the more technical
term for that.
There's a lot of stuff that
reproduces--grass,
a lot of the grasses grow this
way.
Parthenogenesis,
anybody know who reproduces
parthenogenetically?
 
Fish do, etc.,
there's fish,
worms;
all kinds of things reproduce
parthenogenetically.
 
The idea that life begins at
conception, that life has any
start point is really not what
textbooks are saying.
It's saying life is a cycle,
it's repeated,
organisms use different
versions of the cycle,
and many organisms reproduce
asexually with no version of
that.
 
This gets a little more
interesting when you go from a
freshman textbook to an upper
level textbook.
A few years ago I got an old
copy of the upper level,
this is Biology
241--Reproductive Biology,
and I presume none of you have
taken that.
Now it gets really interesting.
 
This is the beginning of an
embryo in your grandmother,
or in your grandfather,
it doesn't matter.
Can you see tiny little dots
here?
Maybe if we turn out the light
you can see them,
but it doesn't matter,
believe me there's tiny little
dots that this line is pointing
to.
This is inside your
grandmother's womb,
this is your mother or your
father,
just remember that's your
mother or father sitting in
there,
and outside your mother and
father,
in the yolk sac,
which you think of as just for
eating,
there's an epithelial wall--an
epithelium is just a set of flat
cells like a skin that bound--
organs are mostly covered
around in an epithelium.
 
Some of the cells in the
epithelium start differentiating
differently than a skin cell and
they pop out into the center
here.
 
Then as development goes on,
of your mother inside your
grandmother,
or your father inside your
grandmother,
not inside your grandfather,
these cells crawl up into the
embryo,
through a tube,
and they sit in--they come to
sit up here in the cells that
are going to become the rest of
your gonad.
 
Your germ cells start--When a
developmental biologist or
reproductive biologist discusses
this;
this is in a sense the start of
life.
In your grand--in your mother
or father's embryo inside your
grandmother and then more events
happen and the whole book is
about those events.
 
What are those events?
 
Many--and so this is on Page 7,
the beginning,
this is what happens in the
beginning, and when do we get to
fertilization?
 
Well here's the next one.
 
Coitus and fertilization,
and this is on Page 201,
so there's 200 pages of events
that take place in between.
Fertilization is not the first
or the second,
but it's the third kind of
event, even in this one chapter
and its purpose is the
establishment of diploid,
again referring to the cycle of
haploid diploid.
Just to let you know that
fertilization is not an
essential event,
it includes parthenogenetic
activation as an equivalent step
that can do in the cycle as well
as fertilization.
 
The difference between asexual
reproduction and parthenogenesis
is: asexual reproduction doesn't
go through a halving and a
doubling of the chromosomes.
 
In pathogenesis,
you, in fact,
start with haploid cells,
haploid organism,
and then there is a mechanism
for just doubling it without
bringing in genes from somewhere
else.
What the cell does is mitosis;
it's the normal state where
cells double but then they
split.
This is a doubling of the
chromosome but no split,
so you go from a haploid stage
to a diploid stage.
While we're on
parthenogenesis--I actually
didn't know this until I read
this.
It introduces--The spermatozoon
induces many remarkable changes
in the oocyte at fertilization,
but it's not essential for many
of them.
 
An oocyte may be activated
parthenogenetically by a variety
of bizarre stimuli such as
electric shock,
exposure to various enzymes,
or to alcohol.
You guys that think you're
having a big role,
well just bring your electric
shockers and it'll do almost as
well.
 
They mimic whatever it is that
the sperm does and what's
interesting is that the embryo,
the partheo--this is a human;
this is a textbook of human
reproductive biology.
It can undergo cleavage,
implantation,
and development to the stage of
a beating heart,
somites and forelimbs.
 
The stage at which a lot of the
right to lifers show you,
well this is a human already,
actually can happen without any
intervention of a sperm
whatsoever.
Eventually, in a human,
there are parthenogenetic
animals and other organisms,
but in a human,
the embryo, the fetus
eventually dies,
but apparently it's a
deficiency in the placenta not
in the fetus itself.
 
It's quite amazing.
 
Again, loosens up your whole
mind about what is biology is
actually saying about life and
it's not saying that it has a
beginning and it's certainly not
saying the beginning is at
fertilization.
 
Having started this train of
thought for myself,
we've done a freshman text,
we've done an upper level text,
now let's get into the research
literature.
I've just underlined these.
 
Here's a research literature.
 
This is Science magazine
which--is one all scientists
read, it has the latest,
greatest stuff.
You wish you could publish in
it, and so forth.
It's from 2007 and it's about
the germline which is eggs and
sperms.
 
In the early embryo cells
decide between becoming soma or
germline.
 
When I showed you the yolk sac
in your grandmother,
the soma, the body,
are the cells that stay in the
yolk sac and form the lining of
the yolk sac,
and produce the enzymes I think
which digest the yolk.
Those that migrate out become
the germline.
Evolution doesn't want the
germline to go through a lot of
divisions because every division
introduces the possibility of a
mutation.
 
Every time you have to copy
your chromosomes you can get
into trouble.
 
Very early on,
in fact in your grandmother,
the germline separates out and
is held in abeyance for decades
often.
 
Now again, the important thing
is this constancy of the
germline,
it's necessary for species
continuity,
that's all that kind of stuff
and here again,
all kinds of events take place.
The only mention of
fertilization in this whole
introduction to this special
section,
this is a special section just
in this issue,
is in one of the later
paragraphs.
Now, I was being very pleased
with myself getting exactly the
right things that I wanted to
show you and make this point,
that, at all levels of
scientific discourse,
life does NOT begin at
conception.
Then I stepped back from it a
little bit and what do I notice?
What's the logo up there?
 
The logo is the fertile--an egg
being fertilized.
I said, oh my gosh,
that contradicts everything I'm
trying to say;
because it's sort of makes out
that the most important thing
about this whole process is
fertilization.
 
After my initial shock,
I get over it;
I look at it and say,
that's a fake.
Fertilization does not look
like that,
and anybody who's taken a
biology course and seen these
pictures,
there's first of all a whole
lot of sperms,
there isn't just one sperm
sitting like that,
it's a whole lot of them.
That would be a very nice trick
to get a green oocyte and a red
sperm together,
and I said that's a fake
picture.
 
You're not supposed to do that
kind of fakery in science,
but it turns out,
the scientists didn't do that
but these journals--
this is a mass produced
thing--Science sells
millions of copies all around
the world,
so they have an art department.
I don't know if you can see
this but that picture is made by
Getty Images.
 
Getty is one of the big--Getty
Images Visuals,
Unlimited;
they're not limited,
they're unlimited.
 
This was put in not by the
scientific authors,
it's not mentioned in the
article, so you're not supposed
to take it seriously.
 
And in fact,
when you go after this kind of
stuff--I just looked about two
pages later--well here it is
blown up so you can see that
better.
There's the exact picture from
which it's come,
and you can see the flatness
here, and this little thing
here,
and if you go back they show
you the flatness here and the
little thing here.
They've shown you
exact--inadvertently,
they don't mention this at all;
they show you exactly where
they faked it from.
 
What they did is they took this
image, and then took a red sperm
image from somewhere else,
laid it on top,
and put them on there.
 
Yes, I was going to say
something about laying it on but
I won't, you can guess.
 
What's the moral of the story
of this last little bit?
Even prestigious scientific
journals, when they're not
thinking scientifically,
will lapse into the common
parlance;
this is the society in which
they live.
 
The important thing about
reproduction is fertilization,
that's the common thing;
it's not a scientific thing but
even scientists and scientific
journals can mess that up.
The whole phrasing of this
debate in terms of when does
life begin is a cultural
holdover from the many centuries
when there was no scientific
understanding of reproduction.
You have to think,
well, when does life begin?
What is the alternative to it
being a cycle from life coming
from life that we now know is
the case?
Well it's got to come from
something that's not alive.
Then the question comes up very
naturally, if you think life
comes from something not alive,
then you say,
well when does life begin?
 
What is that called when you
believe that life comes from not
life?
 
Come on you had this in high
school.
This is a dead--
Student:  Spontaneous
generation.
 
Prof: Spontaneous
generation, right.
When did they--do you remember
when this was shown to be not
the case?
 
Student:  Pasteur.
 
Prof: Pasteur was the
final step in it.
It actually comes earlier,
the first guy was Francesco
Redi--
well first let me tell
you--what are the observations
that make--
that made people think that
there was spontaneous
generation?
 
Take a caterpillar and a moth.
 
You have a caterpillar and its
one kind of organism,
it crawls around,
it puts itself up into a
cocoon,
and if at any time,
not the very beginning and not
the very end but in the middle,
you open up a cocoon what you
see is goo.
The caterpillar has just sort
of decayed, just fallen apart
into a goo.
 
Then you look sometime later
and out pops this beautifully
formed butterfly and it doesn't
look anything like the
caterpillar.
 
The only reasonable way of
interpreting this is that,
indeed, the caterpillar died,
it put itself into a little
coffin,
and it rotted,
it fell apart,
but that's very nutritious and
out of this nutrition somehow
came the butterfly,
spontaneous generation and that
was what was believed about
that.
 
You take rotting meat,
where do you find fly's coming
out of--maggots,
where do you find maggots?
Rotting meat,
rotting food,
so you do an experiment,
you go around and you find some
road kill or something.
 
They didn't really have cars
back then but--this is all late
1600s, 1700s it changes at that
time.
They take a dead animal and
maggots come out of it.
Well what it is,
you can take the dead meat that
you find around,
and put it in a jar and close
it up,
and, if you haven't actually
killed it very fresh,
out come the maggots,
and you haven't let any maggots
crawl into it.
Where do fish come from?
 
Well, shallow,
most people who fish a lot know
they come from shallow water
mostly and they grow up in the
reeds so the fish come from the
reeds.
Then you get a little
imaginative about it,
and if you read the literature
from this era,
which I haven't,
but there's a lot of books that
do and tell you the juicy
tidbits.
It is believed that it was
possible to create mice by
putting a dirty shirt and a few
grains of wheat into a sealed
jar and letting it sit for 21
days.
That scientifically tells you
the gestation period of a mouse
is 21 days when it's made from a
dirty shirt.
I think some of you
undergraduates probably know
that from experience.
 
As we'll see in a little bit,
human life was presumed to come
from menstrual blood,
which is also dead and as a
sort of coagulation kind of
process.
I'll show you what that was
about.
In everything from an insect to
a human,
spontaneous generation was the
most obvious interpretation of
what you could observe for many
hundreds of years,
until the experimental
techniques really took over and
people started showing that was
not true.
The first real break in this
was Francesco Redi in about
1668, who studied butterflies
and he did it very carefully.
They hadn't really used
scalpels before,
and so if you pull apart a
cocoon without a really nice
sharp knife,
you get more mush--you get mush
at all stages.
 
He used a scalpel,
cut it apart,
and you could see that early
on,
that actually inside the
caterpillar you could see the
rudiments of the adult moth
happening,
and then he could watch the
development inside the
caterpillar.
 
That was stunning to the world
when he started talking about
this to scientific societies:
that a moth did not come from
the rotting caterpillar but came
from the cells--
they didn't have the idea of
cells back then but came from
the body of the caterpillar
itself.
Then Spallanzani,
when I went to high school,
Spalanzani was the hero--I
don't know why instead of Redi,
and he did the next step of it,
and that was the next century.
He worked around the 1750s,
and finally Louis Pasteur
showed that it was true also for
microorganisms.
That was what Pasteur put the
final nail in the coffin,
not only animals,
plants, insects which are
animals, but finally
microorganisms.
By the later 1800s is when this
idea of spontaneous generation
for everything alive
disappeared.
The phrase, which
was--originated much earlier but
not proven, was omnia ex
ova, everything comes from
an egg.
 
That there's always some sort
of a cycle of generation.
We've known for about 250 years
that there is no spontaneous
generation that life is a cycle,
and in the cycle you can't
point to a beginning,
so it's very hard--it's a sign
of--there's just the persistence
of cultural ideas that the
culture somehow hasn't caught
onto that.
Now more educated people,
when discussing this in more
detail,
understand that it's a cycle
but they decide that
fertilization is the final
genetic--
sets the final genetic
constitution of the fetus and
therefore we can legitimately
say--
point to that as the origin
point.
 
Of course that's not true.
 
Now that we know in great
detail.
I don't want to--this is not a
course in reproductive biology
but somewhere I've got--
actually at the time of--I'll
talk about this later.
 
I don't know why this is going
slowly.
At the time of fertilization
the nucleus of the egg is still
diploid.
 
It's only after fertilization
and sometime later,
that the female nucleus goes
through its final division and
that's random which chromosomes
are going to be included in the
embryo and which chromosomes are
not.
The final--part of the
step--one of the steps of the
final genetic constitution
happens after fertilization,
if you again define
fertilization as the entry of
the sperm.
 
And then even later,
the female has two Xs,
but in every cell only one X is
going to be active.
Again, at a later stage,
in fact way after this
multi-cellular division has
already taken place,
in each cell one of the Xs gets
inactivated and basically
crumples up and gets thrown
away.
The final genetic constitution
is not set until a good bit of
time after fertilization.
 
We can see this in Calico cats.
 
Calico cats have these sorts of
biggish black patches and
biggish orange patches.
 
We don't have that with our
hair, our hair is usually all
one color until it turns gray,
but in Calico cats what you're
seeing is at a certain point in
development,
and you can count the number of
patches so you know how many
cells this comes from,
in one cell there will be two
sets of genes.
 
One which will have the melanin
gene to make melanin and make it
black,
and one will miss that and make
an orange patch,
and in this cell the gene for
orange turns off and so you get
a black--
the chromosome that has the
orange--
the whole chromosome is turned
off and you get a black patch,
and in this one,
the one for melanin gets turned
off and you get an orange patch.
 
The number of patches tells you
at what cell stage this process
happened because each of those
patches are the descendants of a
single cell in a somewhat
advanced embryo.
The number of genetic things
that happen after fertilization
is quite significant.
 
Even moderately sophisticated
things that educated people
believe about development and
when it begins are just plain
wrong.
 
The only scientific response to
the question of when life begins
is, when does one say?
 
Well four billion years ago,
when the first cell in some
slime of some sea somewhere or
something,
life began and since then cells
have replicated cells.
In a sense, since every cell in
your body is the result of a
split of some prior cell,
in a sense every cell in your
body has been alive for four
billion years.
There's never been anything
dead in the past of that.
There's really very more
interesting things about
development if I can get this to
work.
Development is a very,
very chancy operation there,
so this is the germ cells.
 
This is in a female but
everything I'm saying about a
female happens in a male.
 
What happens is from conception
this is the number of germ cells
that they can count and they get
up to seven million germ cells.
Then, again,
before birth,
they start dying.
 
For instance,
in a woman, most of the class
is female,
you're born with this number of
potential eggs--
I'm sorry you've developed this
many eggs,
than most of them die right
away, and then as gestation
continues more of them die at
birth,
then they keep dying and by the
time you're sexually mature
there's only a very few left.
We used to believe,
and maybe still believe,
that that's all the eggs you're
ever going to have and a similar
sort of thing happens with
sperms,
not quite the same.
 
There's now recent research
that seems to show that there
are some stem cells,
the kind of cells that
originally produced all these
oocytes,
that there are some stem cells
that hang around.
Then, in fact,
after this period you can make,
females can make more eggs.
 
For the artificial
fertilization,
artificial reproduction
clinics, this is now a really
hot area of research.
 
Can we find those stem cells?
 
For infertile women can we get
them to now make egg cells
later?
 
That's one set of a real
decrease in the potential.
You start with seven million
potential eggs but you'll
ovulate like 400 eggs during a
woman's life.
This is what ovulation looks
like.
This is an ovary,
a proper thing,
and this is the egg that's
coming out and this guy is--
this doctor I guess is trying
to extract the egg for someone,
either experimental or in
vitro fertilization kind of
procedure where they can take
the egg and inject it,
fertilize it externally,
inject it back into the female,
and all kinds of wonderful
things can happen.
Now, after fertilization,
this winnowing of--continues
very largely.
 
There's a lot of genetic death.
 
Now you have your
fertilization,
the early events of really
setting the genetic constitution
have taken place,
and often they don't work.
It turns out that from
fertilization,
in the next few weeks something
like 80% of conceptuses die.
It's a quite striking
phenomenon.
It's called pregnancy wastage
and humans have it more than
other animals and we don't
understand why.
All mammals have this same
process but it's really extreme
in humans and there's nothing
but theories about why this
happens.
 
It's mostly genetic death,
so I told you that you start
with a diploid cell,
the germ cell that's crawling
out of the sac,
and it has two copies of each
chromosome.
 
The chromosome unfolded is a
huge thing,
and it has to fold itself up,
it has to pair,
they have to all the--26 pairs
have to pair and then they have
to split nicely.
 
Well that is a very complicated
process that frequently does not
work.
 
What you end up with is,
instead of one copy going each
way;
you get two copies in this say
egg, or this sperm and no copy
in the other one.
Then as events go on,
if you have two copies here,
and it gets fertilized by a
sperm then you have three copies
and that's lethal for almost
every chromosome,
and if you have no copies and
it gets fertilized by a sperm
you get one copy and that's
lethal for almost every
chromosome.
 
The only chromosome for which
there isn't lethality is the
Down syndrome chromosome where
you can--I think it's 23 .
You can survive with three
copies of that and that's Down
syndrome.
 
You know the frequency of Down
syndrome, one in however many
thousand it is .
 
For every Triplo,
that's called Triplo because
you have three copies of that
chromosome, there's a null,
you get no copy.
 
You get just the one from the
sperm.
Where if it's the sperm that
has this problem,
you get the one from the egg.
 
That dies and every other
chromosome dies.
There's one other chromosome
where there's some viability.
You take the frequency of Down
syndrome, you double it for that
chromosome for the null.
 
Then you multiply it by the 46
chromosomes--
23 pairs of chromosomes that
there are and you get a number
that just from this process,
which is called
non-disjunction,
what the death rate of the
oocyte--
of the fertilized eggs is.
Then there's all kinds of other
genetic problems which I won't
go into.
 
The experimentally observed,
the empirically observed thing
is that the actual number is
78%.
I say 80% but if you read the
paper its 78% of fertilized
conceptus' than die very rapidly
of genetic death.
The mother doesn't even know
that she is pregnant because
there's--she doesn't know
anything in the first couple of
weeks.
 
Her period may be a little bit
delayed, maybe not delayed at
all.
 
You get really interesting
legal and religious
complications.
 
Well, there's some theology
here which you can ask me about
later if you want to know,
but standard Christians are
supposed to believe that
resurrection is in the flesh.
You come back in pretty much
the same state that you died in.
if 80%--If you believe that
then--if you add to that that
life begins at conception,
that means at the fertilized
egg, then that means that 80% of
the embryos--
of the resurrected bodies in
heaven are going to be in a test
tube,
they're just a few cells big.
So, it gets into very serious
kinds of religious
complications.
 
It also gets into legal
complications;
I can't remember what state it
is.
A woman got pulled over,
so this state--
she was on a highway and in an
HOV lane,
a high occupancy vehicle lane,
where you're supposed to have
at least two people in the car.
 
She was pulled over by the cop
because it was just her,
and the cop started writing her
a ticket.
She says, 'No,
no I'm pregnant and so there's
two of us in this car,' and it
became a serious kind of court
case.
 
If, legally,
one decides that an embryo or a
fetus is a person from the
moment of conception,
then every time a woman doesn't
have a baby,
or she drives,
the police are going to have to
carry around pregnancy tests and
examine this.
It's--the conclusion,
not the conclusion but--Another
point about this--Anybody knows
roughly how long it takes to get
pregnant if you're trying?
 
Five months.
 
Does that tie up with anything
I just said?
If 80% of conceptuses die,
that's 4 out of 5.
If it takes five months to get
pregnant, what happens in the
other four months?
 
Well those are the four months
that you on average did not get
pregnant.
 
Though this is not proven,
but the numbers work out that
there's really no other
reasonable interpretation.
When a woman is having regular
sex without protection,
trying or not trying to get
pregnant,
she gets pregnant every month,
but four out of the five months
the fetus--
the conceptus,
dies early--the fetus dies
early and she doesn't even
really necessarily know about
it.
Then in the fifth month,
on average, out comes a fetus.
Again, legally and religiously,
that if one--
decides for themselves that
life begins at conception and a
woman is having sex,
that means every month a human
being has died.
 
There has to be a death
certificate.
There may have to be an
inquest, why did this fetus die,
did the mother drink alcohol or
do something that might have
caused that to die?
 
Is she causing the death of
this full human being?
Religiously you would have to
have a burial,
a memorial mass;
you would have to do all the
religious things that attend to
death.
The fact, that's not widely
appreciated, that 80% of
conceptus' die genetically sits
uneasily with an idea that life
begins at conception.
 
We're talking about the
chanciness of the reproduction.
We saw, that out of all these
eggs that are started,
so many die before you're born,
and then even those that get
fertilized,
not many of them get fertilized
because most people aren't
having sex all the time.
You don't have 400--So,
there are 400 eggs that you
ovulate and only a small
fraction of those will get
fertilized no matter what your
sex life is like,
so there's a big death there.
 
Of those that do get
fertilized, 80% of them die,
and then of course as you're
well aware from this course,
once a child is born up until
very modern times of medicine,
something like a third of the
kids died as infants or
children,
so it's a very,
very chancy procedure and
there's elimination at all kinds
of stages.
 
Okay so I sort of hit you over
the head with idea of life as a
cycle, and that is of course the
only scientific way to look at
it.
 
When does a cycle begin?
 
Can you even say something like
that?
Well sometimes it's necessary
to arbitrarily put a beginning
to the cycle.
 
One of the most common cycles
is the seasons,
is the year.
 
The year is a cycle,
it gets warm and then it gets
cold, and different cultures
choose different times to start
the year.
 
In our culture,
it's January 1,
and why is it January 1?
 
It's close to the winter
solstice, the lowest point of
the sun, then the sun starts
coming up after that,
which is December 22.
 
Well the calendars weren't very
good and they didn't it quite
right,
Christmas and New Years,
and December 22--
or 21st are supposed to all be
the same day,
but the calendars were not good
enough to do that.
 
The Romans put it at the Ides
of March, you remember Julius
Caesar getting killed then,
and I just read the history of
that.
 
They changed their calendar
many times but during most of
their period it was the Ides of
March, which is March 15.
Chinese put their New Year in
February;
they have lunar calendars so it
rolls around a little bit.
Jewish New Year is in September
and then that's a lunar calendar
so that rolls around a little
bit.
Every culture decides how it
wants to set the beginning of
the year.
 
It's conventional,
it's not a scientific
statement, and it's whatever any
of the culture decides.
Similarly, with when does life
begin?
Different cultures have decided
different start points for this
cycle of life.
 
One of the common ones is that
life only begins after the worst
period of infant mortality.
 
There are many emotional
economic legal reasons that you
really don't want to consider
someone a human until they've--
you're somewhat sure that the
infant is going to stay alive.
Among the Fulani of West
Africa, Nigeria,
an infant becomes a person and
it's given a name seven days
after birth because that's the
most extreme period.
The Navajo, in America,
don't consider the child is
alive,
again for this period of infant
death,
and after delivery it's kept in
a cradle board as a kind of an
extension of pregnancy.
It comes out,
it's put in a cradleboard and
that's considered the mother is
still pregnant with the baby,
and this is very nice.
 
When the child laughs for the
first time then it's considered
to be a human being and to be
alive,
and then they have a big
ceremony to mark this child's
birth.
 
In some cases,
that you've read about,
birth happens at puberty.
 
In some of the New Guinea
tribes, the infant stays with
the women until puberty,
and even boys are considered to
be women,
they're just female boys and
girls are not differentiated.
 
At puberty, the males steal the
boy away and they have a birth
ceremony.
 
You remember reading about this
in New Guinea.
Upon becoming a mother even
because it's so--
in traditional China,
which means up until the
Communist revolution,
if not later,
a woman has sort of two lives.
 
As you may remember from one of
your readings,
that often a woman,
a girl child is not even given
a name;
number one girl,
number two girl,
number three girl,
they don't even get a name and
they have sort of a
quasi-existence.
 
In this--these parts of Chinese
culture,
a mother is considered to start
her life all over again at the
birth of her first son,
not her daughter but the birth
of her first son.
 
The mother takes a new name at
this time and she has a--
she'll, by that time have a
family name,
but her son is never allowed to
learn what the name of her
prior--
previous life was.
For all intents and purposes
her life begins at the birth of
her first son.
 
You read the article about the
Egyptian woman;
do you remember what her name
was?
Om Gad, and that means?
 
Mother of Gad,
so again, she takes the name
which--she has a whole life
that's starting anew,
in a sense, when she has the
first son, mother of Gad.
The idea is that different
cultures have very different
takes on when life begins.
 
Since it's a cycle and it's
arbitrary, cultures have a
perfect right to choose whatever
point they want for the
beginning of this cycle.
 
Even within a culture,
and I'm talking about the
culture of my friends,
who are largely medical people,
they all have very strong ideas
about when life begins.
The obstetricians and
gynecologists,
because the vast majority of
fertilizations do not result in
a fetus,
and the mother doesn't show any
signs of it,
the mother doesn't know,
there's no change in her body,
you can't test anything about
the body,
they consider implantation,
where the early embryo sits
into the uterine wall and at
that point there's hormonal
signals going--
bouncing back and forth between
the fetus and the maternal one.
At that point the mother's body
starts changing and so they
consider that the begin point.
 
When they say 'you're pregnant'
they're not talking about
fertilization they're talking
about implantation.
This has caused lots of debate.
 
Depending on where you define
this some--
like birth control pills and
various devices are supposed to
work after fertilization but
before implantation.
If you ask someone who's
talking about beginning of life
at fertilization,
they say that's abortion.
If you're talking with
something about the beginning of
life is at implantation,
that's not abortion.
This is almost never put out
when people are arguing fiercely
about these things,
that they're just using
different definitions of when
things begin.
Another very standard one,
very important in Western
history, is the ability to move.
 
Back then, starting back from
Aristotle,
the difference between dead and
alive was whether something had
the power of motion and that was
called animation.
When you move you're animated,
like a cartoon,
a cartoon is a fixed image in a
comic book or something,
then you have animated
cartoons, and that's where they
move around.
 
You've probably heard 'The
Quick and the Dead'?
Quick referring to movable as a
famous book, The Quick and
the Dead,
and it's a very common
expression.
 
That you're either dead or you
have the power to move.
St.
 
Thomas Aquinas tied together,
it actually comes from
Aristotle and we'll go back to
that in a minute,
tied, in Catholic theology,
the ability to move with
animation being alive and that
happens at--
we now call it quickening,
when the mother can feel the
fetus start to kick.
 
That's another way so you can
have--when the embryo plants,
when the embryo starts to move.
 
The neonatologists are very
interested in fetal viability.
Can the fetus stay alive
outside the mother?
They argue that this is a sign
that it's an independent being,
because it can live outside the
mother.
That turns out to be,
the most delicate thing is,
when the lungs can function.
 
A fetus or a baby can live
outside the mother as long as
there is enough lung function,
so for the neonatologists,
life begins when there's enough
lung function so that it can
live outside the uterus.
 
Now neurologists,
I'm a neurobiologist,
so neurologists are closest to
my--I don't know to my heart,
but they're close to me,
they always define the
beginning of life as when is
someone human,
as referring to some mental
capacity that they can do.
It might be motor response,
it might align with the ability
to move,
that they're looking for motor
responses,
it might be brainwaves,
it might be ability to sense
something.
One variant of the
neurologist's point of view has
gotten, to some extent embedded
in the public debate.
This is when the fetus can feel
pain and that's the point at
which life begins for legal
purposes, as they perceive it.
There's some research on this
question, not an awful lot,
it's very hard to tell.
 
What you can determine
experimentally is,
we know there's pain receptors
on the surface like if you
electric shock something or burn
it or something,
there's pain receptors,
we can identify those,
we can stimulate those,
and we know the pathways by
which it goes up to the cortex.
 
By the seventh month,
at the beginning of the seventh
month,
those neural pathways are
mature enough so that at least
the information that there's
some pain has gone into the
cortex.
We still have no information on
what, if anything,
the cortex does with that
information at this stage.
It may not be ready to have any
kind of response to it.
I go on about all these
different ways of defining the
beginning of a cycle,
beginning of the cycle of life,
and it's up to your cultural or
scientific,
or academic predilections.
 
You can do set whenever you
want.
All of those designations are
equally legitimate and equally
illegitimate.
 
None of them are a scientific
question.
Science will describe to you
all the stages of the cycle,
but it won't say anything about
where you should say the
beginning of the cycle is.
 
It's a chicken and the egg
problem, just very simply.
Now you have this thing that is
not a scientific question.
There's tremendous cultural
diversity about it.
There's tremendous diversity
within the public of one culture
like ours about it.
 
But, the law has to define
murder because you can't go and
murder a TA because they gave me
a bad grade.
So the law has to define
some--has to accept one of these
points.
 
There's law has had a variety
of things.
What the law likes is what they
call a bright white line.
That it's clear to everybody
when you've crossed this line.
Since the development of the
fetus in the uterus is
continuous, there's no
particular point in time that
you can say;
this stage is different than
the day before.
 
No point during gestation would
be a bright white line that
everyone agrees that it either
happened or didn't happen.
What they--the bright white
line today is birth;
everybody knows when someone
has given birth.
I'll tell you in a moment that
in Jewish Rabbinic law it's even
more specific.
 
It's when half the head sticks
out--that's when birth happens,
that's when the fetus becomes a
baby.
Pretty much the courts have
stuck, so far in America,
with this conclusion that birth
is the bright white line,
everybody can agree on that.
 
There's also a fair amount of
religious opinion that
quickening, that's another--at
least to the
mother--identifiable event.
 
Now an outside person can't
necessarily tell this,
but the mother does not know
whether she's pregnant until
quickening,
until she feels the baby kick.
She can miss a period but
there's a quite few reasons for
missing a period other than
pregnancy.
Some of the earlier laws and
continuing into some of the
abortion laws refer to
quickening as bright a line as
you can get.
 
But there, the mother knows it
before everyone else.
Eventually you can put your ear
or your hand to a pregnant
woman's stomach and feel the
kicks but the mother knows
early.
 
Since that happens over--in
different pregnancies over quite
a wide range of time,
over actually a month to month
and a half before the kicks
become sensible,
it's not a very good kind of a
line.
Okay, so we so far have the
idea of the beginning of life is
not a scientific idea,
it's very variable in cultures,
and so we still haven't really
answered the question of why
this idea that life begins
conception is such a prevalent
idea in the West.
 
Again, other cultures have
different kinds of ideas.
One thing of course that pops
up to mind is,
is it biblical,
because so much of our culture
comes from biblical ideas.
 
Well you know what--what is
life--what does the Bible say
about when life begins?
 
Anybody know?
 
Nobody--there's all this
fundamentalism in America and
nobody here.
 
Well what is the cycle of life
described in the Bible?
This is common in literature;
any literature major should
know this.
 
Dust to dust.
 
You've--how many of you have
heard dust to dust?
Yeah, or sometimes translated
as earth to earth,
it's Genesis 2:7:
"God formed man of dust
from the ground until he
returned to the ground,
for out of it you are taken,
you are dust and to dust you
shall return."
 
That's the cycle of life.
 
If there's a beginning to the
cycle, at what age did God
create Adam?
 
There's something moderately
explicit about that.
Created Adam in his own image,
well the image of God is
not--it's not a fertilized egg,
right?
Whatever you perceive the image
of God, it's more or less an
adult person.
 
Of course, right away Adam was
able to receive commandments to
not eat the fruit and so forth,
and suddenly Eve was born out
of his rib,
certainly not a two cell cycle.
Again, in the Old Testament
there's just no support
whatsoever for the idea that,
as a biblical idea,
that life begins at conception.
 
There is no--in the New
Testament the issue just doesn't
come up at all.
 
There's no statement about when
life begins.
We'll come to some statements
which are very loosely
interpreted in that way in a
minute.
Very interesting.
 
There's two great Catholic and
then Christian because
Christians have inherited most
of the theologians--St.
Augustine and St.
 
Thomas Aquinas,
you've heard of them.
St.
 
Augustine came first in 300 and
something,
and, in his Confessions,
he's interested in this
question and he says,
"Tell me God,
tell me whether there was some
period of my life which preceded
my infancy.
 
Is this period that I spent in
my mother's womb,
was I anywhere or any sort of a
person?
I have no one able to tell me
that, neither my father nor my
mother, nor the experience of
others, nor my own memory."
Here's one of the greatest
Catholic saints and theologians,
who's of course read the Bible,
knows it backwards and
forwards,
and he is very well aware that
there isn't information in that
to tell him that answer.
The conclusion is,
that this isn't a really
biblical, the idea that life
begins at conception,
is not something that comes
from the Bible.
I'm going to switch a little
bit and come back to this--these
kinds of thoughts.
 
A little bit of the history of
abortion.
Abortion has been known in
history as far as back as we can
trace.
 
The oldest reference is from
Egyptian hieroglyphs in tomb
paintings, so we're talking
about the very early
civilization.
 
As soon as people can write,
they're writing about abortion.
By the time of the Roman Empire
there were lots of references to
abortion in the literature and
there are no laws against it.
The Romans didn't consider it.
 
As I've just mentioned,
in the New Testament,
it's not mentioned at all and
there's of course nothing
forbidding it.
 
The New Testament and the Roman
Empire are contemporaneous of
course,
and so the conclusion is that,
even though abortion was very,
very common at that time and
used by all classes of people,
there was not an issue for the
New Testament writers.
 
At the end of the Roman--this
classical period,
this Judeo-Christian way of
thinking about things comes into
the mainstream of Western
civilization.
There is an explicit passage
about abortion in the Old
Testament.
 
Don't call it out but anybody
knows--at least one person ought
to know what this passage is.
 
One, two, so it's a very,
very minor number of people.
The Ten Commandments,
which you all know,
and you all know this passage
also, but I'll get to it.
The Ten Commandments are in
Exodus 20 and the sixth of the
commandments,
as you know,
"you shalt not kill".
 
What does this mean?
 
What do all these laws mean?
 
In the following chapters,
there's an explanation of how
to interpret these laws.
 
There's various violent acts
that men do and which ones are
accepted.
 
May you beat your slave?
 
May you kill your slave?
 
May you do this,
may you do that?
And there's a lot of
jurisprudence in there.
What do these one sentence Ten
Commandments ,
what do they--how do you
interpret them in particular
cases?
 
In Exodus 21,
for instance,
what to do in cases of murder?
 
What if one man hits another
with a stone or his fist?
What if a man kills his servant?
 
What if a man kills a thief?
 
All of this exegesis;
in this passage where it's
explaining the Ten Commandments,
including thou shalt not kill;
it describes a crime that is
much worse than a modern
abortion.
 
In a modern abortion,
a woman, for whatever reason,
doesn't want to be pregnant.
 
She goes to a doctor and says,
'please doc I want an abortion,
I don't want to be pregnant and
here's $150 or $200 or whatever
it costs,
and please do this for me,' so
it's voluntary on the part of
the woman.
This passage in the Bible
describes a worse situation
where a man violently,
against the woman's will,
causes her to miscarry or
abort.
This is the quote,
"When men have a fight and
hurt a pregnant woman so that
she suffers a miscarriage,"
the man is fighting with the
woman there,
so he goes after the wife
rather than the husband,
"When men fight and hurt a
pregnant woman so that she
suffers a miscarriage,
but no further injury,
the guilty one shall be fined
as much as the woman's husband
demands of him and he shall pay
in the presence of the
judges."
 
Now that is a standard Hebraic,
Old Testament,
law for a property crime.
 
You do a crime,
everyone knows--they decide
that you actually have stolen
this from the person.
The victim gets to say how much
is proper recompense for this.
But, the victim can't ask for
anything outrageous,
so a judge has to basically
approve the settlement.
If the judge approves--you
steal something,
well I want that same thing
back or ten times as much,
or whatever it is,
goes before a judge,
the judge approves it,
if the judge approves it,
it's paid, and that settles it.
 
That's what happens if the
fetus comes out,
if there's this miscarriage but
no further injury,
that's the result.
 
But it continues,
the passage,
"But if injury ensues you
shall give life for life,
eye for eye,
and tooth for tooth."
How many of you heard that
sentence?
Oh my gosh, that's everywhere
in Western civilization,
everybody should have heard
that, that's called the lex
talionis,
the law of the claw sort of
thing and it's very standard,
that retribution for
retribution.
 
It's very, very interesting
because it says an eye for eye,
life for life,
well is he talking about the
baby or the mother?
 
Life for life could be either
even though it says the baby is
born already you can
still--people fiddle a little
bit.
 
Life for life,
eye for eye,
and then what is the third
thing, tooth for tooth;
that lets you know right away,
babies don't have teeth,
that's sort of the one thing
that they're missing and the
fact that this passage selects
that as the third thing to
describe is a very clear
indication that it's not the
fetus they're talking about,
but it's the mother.
This is very;
very clear both from that--so
that if she suffers a
miscarriage, but no further
injury then it's a property
crime.
You've taken away something
that the father,
in particular,
wanted and the father is the
one that gets to decide on it.
 
But, if you do damage to the
mother, then you have to really,
really pay for it.
 
That's the most explicit
passage in the Bible about
abortion and it's totally clear
that it's the life of the
mother,
the life and physical health of
the mother that's the important
thing.
The Jewish Talmudic Law,
which is not the Bible but
writing about it says,
"If a woman is in hard
travail,
and her life cannot otherwise
be saved,
one cuts up the child within
her womb and extracts it member
by member because her life comes
before that of the child.
 
But, if the greater part of the
head was delivered,
one may not touch it,
for one may not set aside one
person's life for the sake of
another."
Again, a very explicit
statement that before birth,
defined as half the head out,
it's the life of the mother is
the only critical thing,
but once that birth has
actually proceeded then they are
equal and you can't even save
the mother's life in this case.
 
What kind of procedure is this
describing that's become
politically very important now?
 
Student:  Partial birth
abortion.
Prof: Partial birth
abortion.
It's the-procedure that the
right-to-life people are very
much opposed to.
 
But, here it is,
from biblical scholars talking
about it as when a woman is in
hard travail and there's nothing
to do but that,
then you go ahead and do that.
Of course this emphasis on the
mother is exactly what is
reflected in the Supreme Court
decision.
I've given you to read the
Roe v.
Wade Decision,
and again, it's the mother that
is the central interest.
 
You may remember that the
Roe v.
Wade divides up pregnancy
into three trimesters.
The first three months,
the second three months,
and the third three months.
 
The first three months are
completely at the mother's
discretion.
 
The second three months the
state can put some controls on
it and the third three months,
after the sixth month,
then the state has a lot of say
in this.
The Supreme Court Decision is
kind of a balance,
and why did they decide to
break it up by not halves?
Why into three months?
 
That probably again comes--is a
biblical thing.
One of the quotes that right to
lifers use a lot,
and again you probably don't
know this, but go talk to a
right to lifer;
if you're
prochoice--whoever--whatever
side of this thing--talk
seriously to someone on the
other side.
It's very--it's always very
informative.
There's this passage where
Elizabeth is pregnant with John
the Baptist, and then Mary gets
pregnant and she goes to see
Elizabeth.
 
John the Baptist,
inside Elizabeth's womb,
jumps for joy.
 
Have any of you heard this
passage used in these debates?
Again, just a few of you,
it's a very,
very standard sort of thing.
 
It goes--it's in Luke,
"And when Elizabeth heard
the greeting of Mary,
the babe leaped in her womb,
for behold when the voice of
your greeting came to my ears,
the babe in my womb leaped for
joy."
This is taken by right-to-life
people that the baby in the womb
is already a sentient,
a person, a full person.
Interestingly,
the story gives extra
information.
 
Zachariah, that's Elizabeth
husband,
they're very religious and
they're old and they have no
children,
but then God rewards their
goodness by making Elizabeth
pregnant.
It's a recast of the Jacob
story where his wife
wasn't--couldn't get pregnant.
 
"After these days his wife
Elizabeth conceived,
and for five months she hid
herself"
… "in the sixth
month Gabriel was sent
…"
to announce to Mary that she
would bear Jesus,
and the angel Gabriel
explicitly explains to Mary that
Elizabeth is now six months
pregnant,
"And behold,
your kinswoman Elizabeth,
in her old age,
has also conceived a son,
and this is the sixth month
with her who was called
barren."
It's amazing because the Bible
is not--in no other passage is
it explicit about the stages of
pregnancy.
This repetition,
that at six months something
special happens is very
diagnostic.
It is almost undoubtedly--they
don't explicitly say it--the
reason why the Supreme Court
said to , instead of in halves,
in thirds.
 
The sixth month,
because that,
in a sense, is in accordance
with one interpretation of these
Bible passages.
 
It also is scientifically
reasonable because it accords
with the time when the fetus
does respond to external
stimuli.
 
By six months,
if the mother gets excited or
something, you can detect it in
the fetal heartbeat and so
forth.
 
If there's a physical bang or
something you can detect it in
the fetus.
 
So, at six months there's some
sort of responsiveness,
neuro-responsiveness going on
in the fetus.
There's other passages and I
put them all in your reading
packet.
 
I put the Exodus passage which
prochoice people refer to if
they know it,
and the prolife passages.
I put them all in your reading
packet and you can read them
all.
 
Given the--basically the
silence, except for this
explicit--
really except for the explicit
passage in Exodus about the
criminal causing an abortion of
this woman,
the Bible is really quite
silent on this issue.
 
Yet it's of theologically great
importance.
So, what has happened is the
Christian theologians had to
rely on the opinions of--
especially the ancient
philosophers because when they--
this all started in the Roman
Empire those were the
philosophers that were of
importance.
 
As I mentioned to you,
Aristotle argued that the
matter of the fetus came from
menstrual blood and--but it got
interesting.
 
After the discharge is over,
so he thought pregnancy started
after menstrual flow had
stopped.
So, in a cycle where there was
a menstrual flow,
he says, "After the
discharge is over and most of it
has passed out,
then what remains begins to
take shape as a fetus."
 
The female menstrual blood,
however, is incapable of doing
this by itself.
 
It must have the stimulus of
the male semen."
They didn't know anything about
sperms at that time but they of
course did know about semen,
and they knew that intercourse
was required.
 
What it did they had no clue.
 
Male semen does not contribute
to the material of the fetus.
He wondered what guided the
development of the blood in the
fetus,
and the thought there must be
some agent that is introduced by
the sperm which causes this
coagulating blood to take form.
 
He, according to Greek word for
this which later gets translated
as 'soul,' and the Western idea
of soul really comes from this
Greek,
this Aristotelian image of
whatever it is that comes in the
semen that--
does not contribute physically
to it,
but organizes this whole thing.
 
Much later in the 1500s and
1600s, when these issues became
hot again, this is one of the
pictures of Aristotle's
coagulum.
 
So, this is the womb,
and inside this stuff is
mother's menstrual blood as it
is presumed,
and it's gradually getting
organized so you really can't
see much of the organization in
there,
but what you can see is the
blood vessels starting to form.
If, in fact you do dissections
of a fetus,
the first thing that forms is
the placenta and this is the
most obvious thing is the blood
vessels of the placenta.
The mother has half the
placenta and the fetus has half
the placenta,
as I hope you know,
and that's where nutrients get
exchanged and waste gets taken
out.
 
Then I guess in the original,
somehow you could see that
there was a gradual formation of
the fetus but finally the fetus
forms as some sort of
coagulation of this blood under
the influence of semen.
 
These--you all know this story,
so we now interpret conception.
Conception is actually a very
vague word,
and I have it in here but there
isn't time to read you what the
Catholic encyclopedia says it
is,
and it's very,
very complicated and it's not
anything that you think it is.
 
We interpret now as more
educated--how do we interpret
conception?
 
We use it as the same idea as
fertilization.
Do any of you make a
distinction between conception
and fertilization?
 
No, I'm not going to ask the
opposite question.
Fertilization is the specific
current scientific concept.
Conception is an old thing,
something undefined,
that an act of intercourse is
needed, and ejaculation of sperm
is needed, and something goes
on.
Unknown, but something goes on
and that leads to conception.
Our current interpretation of
this as fertilization is often
now taken to be the traditional
Western view,
the traditionally Christian
view.
When was fertilization
discovered?
When were sperms discovered?
 
I think you know this.
 
What's the name,
the person who
discovered--invented
microscopes?
Anthony van Leeuwenhoek,
you've heard of Leeuwenhoek?
I'm sure in high school you
went through this.
He was the one that first found
little animalcules,
he took drops of water
and--from ponds and looked at it
and saw all these little things
swimming around and he defined
them as animalcules,
little animals.
Then he looked in sperm and
there were these little things
swimming around.
 
Apparently, I'm not sure that
this is proper history,
the spice trade was real
important back then and they
wanted to know what it was that
gave spice its tangy flavor.
So he invented the microscope
to look at spice so to see--
because it was very expensive
to get spice all the way from
the Middle East,
going through mostly Muslim
countries,
who charged a lot to passage
it, and so it was very expensive
and they wanted to know the
secret of spice and they thought
there was something in it.
So, he invented the microscope
to look at that,
but what he found was little
animalcules and he eventually
looks at sperm and he sees the
animalcules in it.
What does he do?
 
He interprets it as the same
animalcules as in the water.
Well the sperm is made of
something--I'm sorry the semen
is made of something and these
sperm are little contaminants
which are eating it up.
 
They're just like the little
guys you saw on anything that
was rotting.
 
That was a sperm,
but they didn't have any idea
of what it meant.
 
Then, it was much later--they
didn't see human eggs in
mammals,
even mammal eggs that--You can
see eggs of chickens,
you can see eggs of insects,
they're pretty obvious.
 
You can see eggs of fish,
they're pretty obvious,
but the egg of a mammal is so
tiny that it can't be seen.
It was actually William--there
were a number of guys who,
sort of gradually saw it and
gradually realized what it was,
but William Harvey,
the same guy that saw the
circulation--
that figured out the
circulation of blood was one of
the first ones to see an egg.
They just knew about an egg and
they said, well that sort of got
rid of this blood coagulum stuff
and they still had no idea what
was in semen.
 
Even though they saw sperms,
they didn't know that there was
an egg,
so it wasn't until 1840s that
finally fertilization was
discovered in mammals and that
it was actually the physical
matter of the sperm and the
physical matter of the egg that
come together.
The conclusion of all this is
that the culture,
our culture,
and especially the religious
parts of it,
believe that life begins at
conception and believe that this
is a traditional idea.
That it goes way back to the
beginning of Christianity and
even into the Bible.
 
But, in fact,
the whole idea of fertilization
only dates from 1840 and so it's
a very modern idea,
and the whole--And then going
further,
the whole idea of life having a
beginning just doesn't make any
scientific sense because we know
and have known for hundreds of
years that life is a cycle.
 
There is much more,
you have some very interesting
reading on this topic,
and there's infinite amount of
reading that you can do on it.
 
That's all I'll say on it for
today.
