NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/talk/abortion/58247

Text File | 1993-01-28 | 11.4 KB | 238 lines

Newsgroups: talk.abortion
Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!Germany.EU.net!ira.uka.de!gmd.de!newsserver.jvnc.net!darwin.sura.net!gatech!hubcap!opusc!usceast!nyikos
From: [e-mail] (Peter Nyikos)
Subject: Chris Lyman's Massive Denial, Part 3
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Summary: Chris Lyman's "WrongWrong...Wrong!!!!!!" is all wrong
Keywords: individual, unique, geneticist, sophist, National Academy of Science
Sender: [e-mail] (USENET News System)
Organization: USC  Department of Computer Science
Date: 26 Jan 93 17:22:23 GMT
Lines: 225

This is, for the most part, a post which I attempted to make back on 3 Dec,
but it never made yoru boards.

I have not yet posted Parts 1 and 2; the numbering is due to the order
in which these issues appear in Chris Lyman's post to which I was
responding.

That "yoru" was a reminder to myself to mention that Mark Cochran summarily
concluded that Jerome LeJeune would not have anything relevant to say as
far as talk.abortion is concerned.  If so, then neither did Chris Lyman
when he posted the material you see from him below.

Chris Lyman was following up to a post by Graham which quoted an
interesting article by Nat Hentoff, civil libertarian *par excellence*.
Here is one excerpt from that post, edited as though I were following
up to it now:

___________Edited, annotated excerpt from Lyman post___________________________

>>from Ron Graham post (Hentoff speaking?)
>Lyman

>> Once implantation takes place, this being has all the genetic
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^
>> information within that makes each human being unique.
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Wrong. Wrong. WrongWrongWrongWrongWrongWrongWrongWrongWrongWrong!!!!!!

Truly a case of massive denial, as will now be seen.

>From "Abortion and DNA Fingerprinting and Abortion" by Edward Manier,
>Philosophy and Reilly Center, University of Notre Dame:

Has this appeared in a refereed journal?  Or is it a glorified preprint
to be submitted to a completely different kind of publication?  It
certainly reads like a propaganda piece, not a scholarly paper.

Who is Edward Manier?  What is the significance of the word "Reilly"?
One thing is certain: Manier does not write like a philosopher.  He
writes like a sophist, that class of philosophy precursers whom
Socrates and Plato so devastatingly cleaned up.  [This is not meant as a
slur on the whole group. There were some good
ones among them, like Parimenides, and some would class Socrates himself
as a sophist.  But Manier writes like some of the worst ones.]

>    Why would the religious right put forth such a shoddy case to
>    buttress their claim that human life begins at conception?

"Their claim"? 'twas the American Medical Association that made the
claim in the middle of the 19th century.

[Semantic trap: nowadays the American College of Ob/Gyn uses the
redefinition of "conception" which equates it with "implantation".
This lexicographical revisionism, which defines pre-implantation
abortions out of existence, became official in the 1960's.
Previously, as in the case of the 19th century AMA, "conception"
meant "fertilization".]

[Update added Jan. 26: Mark Cochran seems to be unaware of this Orwellian
change.  Could it be that he is only a big brother to Keith and not a
prime candidate for Big Brother?  Or is he playing dumb?]

"Put forth"?  'twas the geneticists in the first half of this century
(but what do you expect from a group whose first member was a Roman
Catholic monk, eh, Chris?) who decided that the chromosomes of the
zygote make each human being unique.

But note something else: Chris Lyman authored his massive denial
in response to the word "implantation."  Manier uses the word "conception".
And, despite the revisionism I spoke about above, he really understands
it to mean "fertilization", as will become clear below.  Perhaps the
biologists, whom he pretends to know a great deal about below, have
not yet caught up with the American College of Ob/Gyn.

[BTW, it would be interesting if it were the case that zoologists restrict
the word "conception" to human beings.  That would be a blatant case
of speciesism that is long overdue for lexicographical revisionism. :-)]

>    Genes do not determine human individuality.  The phenotypic
>    (structural, functional, behavioral) variance in human popu-
>    lations

From "unique" to "individual", and now of course all the excess
baggage of a sophisticated individualistic philosophy is smuggled in;

>       is explained by genes and two crucially significant
>    additional classes of variables:  environment, and interaction
>    of genes and environment.  Development does not occur unless
>    genes and environment interact: read beyond the warning labels
>    on alcoholic beverages or the latest news about smoking and
>    fetal development.

Great.  Now we are so far from this developing human being UNIQUE
that we might as well start talking about whether this human will
become a serial killer, or a Nobel Prize winner.

>       Human chromosomes specifically lack infor-
>    mation necessary for the development of the human brain.

Manier *does* mean "fertilization" rather than "implantation",
else why would he be harping on chromosomes?  The rest of the quote
dispels all doubt.

>    Inference of the presence of a specific and unique human being
>    from evidence that the fertilized human egg has a full
>    complement of human chromosomes (preformationism) has utterly
>    no influence  in current biological thought.

Manier is not above some lexicographical revisionism himself.  If I
recall correctly, "preformationism" refers to the medieval theory
of a miniature human ("homunculus") being
present in the sperm.  [Of course, the whole Manier excerpt is so
permeated with equivocation, it could even be taken to be an attack on
the homunculus theory AND NOTHING ELSE.]

_______________________________End of annotated excerpt___________

I would like to ask Edward Manier just when the whole field of
sociobiology, complete with a book titled _The Selfish Gene_ utterly
lost its influence in current biological thought.

I would also like to ask him just when Jerome Lejeune, world-class
geneticist who discovered the genetic basis of Down's Syndrome, utterly
lost his influence in current biological thought.  No doubt Chris Lyman
can persuade him to provide us with documentation of this astounding
factoid.

Jerome Lejeune is a member of several national Academies of Science,
including the French, Swedish, and American.  I even read in one place
that he is a Nobel Laureate, although I have not been able to confirm
this (perhaps because the places where I have looked so far are several
years out of date).

Dr. Lejeune testified in the State of Tennessee Circuit Court for Blount
County, in Maryville, in the August 1989 custody dispute over frozen
human embryos, Davis v. Davis and King.  The following excerpts from that
testimony were reprinted in Martin Palmer, _A Symphony of The Preborn
Child: Part Two_ (Hagerstown, MD: NAAPC, 1989).  I am indebted for this
reference to Dianne Nutwell Irving, in whose 1991 Georgetown University
Ph.D dissertation the following excerpts are reproduced.  Dissertation
Title: _Philosophical and Scientific Analysis of the Nature of the
Early Human Embryo_, Copyright 1991. [Of course, the following quotes
are in the public domain.]

    As soon as the twenty-three chromosomes carried by the sperm
    encounter the twenty-three chromosomes carried by the ovum,
    the whole information necessary and sufficient to spell out
    all the characteristics of the new being is gathered...then
    a new human being is defined which has never occurred before
    and will never occur again...fertilization produces a personal
    constitution which is entirely typical of this very one human
    being...   [Palmer, op. cit., pp 9-10]

Lejeune is here speaking for a general audience and is not as technically
precise as if he were speaking for an audience of peers [which certainly
do not include the sophist Manier].  He uses the word "human being" already
for the resulting zygote, which means that the *zygote* is here the thing
whose uniqueness is being claimed.  In clarification, he later says:

    But as a geneticist you ask me whether this human being is a
    human, and I would tell you that because he is a being, and being
    human, he is a human being.    [ibid., p.30]

    The very young human being, just after fertilization, after it
    has split in two cells and then in three cells because curiously
    we do not split ourselves in two, four, eight and continue like
    that, no, at the beginning we don't do that.  We split in two
    cells of roughly equal dimension and one of the two cells splits
    in two...we have a stage in which there are three cells.  This
    has been known for fifty, sixty years, and it was remaining a
    mystery for embryology because after that stage of three cells,
    it starts again, it comes to four, and it continues by multiples
    of two.  [ibid., p.14]

He lays stress on this detail for two reasons.  One is to correct a
statement that still prevades a lot of embryology texts, that the two
cells split into four essentially simultaneously.  The other is that
he imbues the three-cell stage [still WELL before implantation, Chris
Lyman take note!] with a special significance:

    It's probably at *that* time that a message goes from one cell
    to the two other cells, come back to th first one and suddenly
    realize we are not a population of cells.  We are bound to be
    an individual.  *That* *is* *individualization*, that makes
    the difference between a population of cells which is just a
    tissue culture and an individual which will build himself
    according to his own rule, is *demonstrated* at the *three*-cell
    stage, that is very soon after fertilization has occurred. [ibid., 15]

[Aside: Jerome Lejeune speaks with a strong French accent, so the
grammatical slips are understandable.  Also the "politically incorrect"
use of non-inclusive language may perhaps be excused. :-)]

Jerome Lejeune certainly showed no signs of either abandoning this
viewpoint, or of having fallen into utter disfavor in the world of
biological thought, when he spoke at the Second Annual Meeting of
University Faculty for Life on June 6-7, in a pair of lectures which
are available in casette form for $5 apiece. [Send check or money order
to University Faculty for Life, box 2273, Georgetown University,
Washington, DC  20057.  Specify Lejeune 1 and/or 2.]
The second lecture is
easily worth the price of both casettes, IMNSHO.  It is a *tour de force* of
biology, philosophy, and humanism.

Towards the end of the second lecture, he spoke of a co-worker in his
laboratory, who has apparently shown that the final formation of the
placenta, marked by intertwining of maternal and fetal circulation
(though NOT connection--despite some peremptory claims by pro-choicers,
the fetus is not a part of the woman's body; this is pseudoscience of
the lowest order) does not take place until the end of the first
trimester.  Up until that point, the z/e/f gets all its nourishment from
the ambient intercellular medium, through the chorion, the precursor
of the placenta.

This discovery, if confirmed, has profound implications for medicine
and the abortion debate.  Such difficulties as Rh incompatibility
may be much more easily handled, given such information.  Also,
transplantation, either from one womb to another, or from an ectopic
pregnancy to the womb, may be pushed all the way up to the end of
the first trimester.  Currently it appears to be at the morula stage,
as in the Tennessee case from which the above testimony is taken.

Peter Nyikos