Personally, I think anyone who places the point of individual life beginning prior to gastrulation just hasn’t given the matter any serious thought. The fundamentalist movement has decided that it's at fertilisation of the egg by sperm, and they lean on the diploid state of the cell ("a complete set of genetic code!!1!") as a crutch to support it. It's deeply stupid, but there it is. That's also why they've been making such a fetish about what they call "snowflake" children - "adopted" extra zygotes from fertility clinics left over from IVF - and is why they can get themselves worked up about RU-486 and emergency birth control, and the lever they use to assert that most forms of birth control secretly cause abortion. (C.f. Concerned Women for America and their TRUTH ABOUT BIRTH CONTROL screeds
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park rangers aren't allowed to say how old the geology is anymore
Wait, what's up with this?
I looked around for some references, and all I found was one bit of exaggerated rhetoric from a guy named Jeff Ruch ("It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is 'no comment.'") Are park rangers really not allowed to tell people how old the rocks are? I have a hard time believing that.
That's neat; Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) are the ones I heard it from. (Not this particularly line; that they were being told to STFU about park ages.)
"Conception" is deep in the culture, and not just for actual physical bodies: ideas are "concepts," and some of this nation's best rhetoric includes the phrase "conceived in liberty."
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The fundamentalist movement has decided that it's at fertilisation of the egg by sperm, and they lean on the diploid state of the cell ("a complete set of genetic code!!1!") as a crutch to support it. It's deeply stupid, but there it is. That's also why they've been making such a fetish about what they call "snowflake" children - "adopted" extra zygotes from fertility clinics left over from IVF - and is why they can get themselves worked up about RU-486 and emergency birth control, and the lever they use to assert that most forms of birth control secretly cause abortion. (C.f. Concerned Women for America and their TRUTH ABOUT BIRTH CONTROL screeds ( ... )
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Wait, what's up with this?
I looked around for some references, and all I found was one bit of exaggerated rhetoric from a guy named Jeff Ruch ("It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is 'no comment.'") Are park rangers really not allowed to tell people how old the rocks are? I have a hard time believing that.
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best,
Joel
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best,
Joel
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