When does life begin?

thall53 said:
The question is: When does life begin?
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Life doesn't begin anew each time a new baby is conceived or born. Life is immortal and it has existed continuously since its mysterious origin in pre-cambrian times.

What happens is that human life keeps alternating between single celled haploid sperm and egg forms, and multicelled diploid organisms that kind of function as fruiting bodies for the production of more haploid cells. There isn't any point in that process when life is absent.

A rather different question inquires into when the unique genetic individuality of each new diploid generation first appears. I guess that occurs at conception.

Yet another question is when indepndent viability begins, when a fetus acquires the ability to live independently of its mother. That's sometime in late pregnancy for humans.

And yet another question inquires into when a new human personality begins. I guess that the answer to that one is sometime in early infancy, when a baby first becomes subjectively aware of itself.
 
ULTRA said:
How do you begin to determine where life starts without looking at the biology?
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First we must specify what we mean by life.
In this forunm,I understand the beginning of human consciousness and not the biological life on earth.
I am of the opinion that we can not determine the exact moment when personal biological life from fertilization until death acquire conscience.
That is why I said, "when you cry the first time".

It means that you have the perception and feelings and you realize that something is wrong. :D
 
To address you directly baftan, I am not religeous, nor have I suggested any religeous connection to the subject. I am a qualified biologist. You obviously have a severe anti-religeous bias, and that is your problem, don't take it out on me. The thread cannot be served without taking biology into account. To suggest otherwise is infantile at best. If I am presented with idiocy, why shouldn't I challange it?
Read the thread above. Maybe learn something.

Life has existed since 3.5bn years ago, but, in my opinion, we all already know that. The Op appears to be asking "When does life begin?" ie. When does a sperm and egg become alive?
I have suggested that, in my opinion this occurs at 14 weeks or so. I have given biological reasons why.
If you have nothing to add, and wish only to attack other people senselessly, then why are you here?
 
ULTRA,
Philosophy is the oldest human science.
Logic is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy.
Please carefully read the first two paragraphs from the link below and tell your opinion about life from this point of view.
You need to have an open mind.




 
thall53 said:
I’m here to voice a thought and am looking for intelligent responses in effort to debate this position. The question is: When does life begin? I know prolife people believe it begins at conception while prochoice believers seem to lean towards actual birth.
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The pro-choice argument isn't usually that there's no life before birth. It is that a foetus does not necessarily have all the same rights as a child that has been born.

My personal opinion is that the life of an individual human being begins at conception, because that is the first time that particular assemblage of genes comes together in a single organism.

But I'm pro-choice. So obviously I don't think that the fact that a foetus is alive is sufficient to give it the rights of an adult human, or even of a newborn baby.
 
Emil said:
ULTRA,
Philosophy is the oldest human science.
Logic is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy.
Please carefully read the first two paragraphs from the link below and tell your opinion about life from this point of view.
You need to have an open mind.
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I doubt, therefore I think.>

I think therefore I think I am.

Please, don't quote Descartes at me..
Don't you know philosophy is like statistics..It can suggest something but prove nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I love philosophy, and there is a philosophical point to all this. I just can't see how you can take a biological subject and try to analyze it without taking biology into account, that's all.
Philosophically speaking, I guess the first moment of sentience could be the moment of true life as we know it.
But I'm more of a biologist than a philpospher - I leave it to others to fill that role.
 
Life has always existed, if it hadn't then how could it begin? It's almost impossible to grasp and becomes a paradox immediately, but that's the true nature of existance, remember? This universe is just one of many, as we know now, so even the big bang theory is not even close enough to explain anything anymore, just a minor course of event in the middle of vast movement. Nothing can not exist.
 
The question.."When does life begin?"..

The answer.. When the work day ends..:cool:
 
I agree with James, post 46, except I would not claim a just fertilized egg is living. For me, it needs to be "viable" - i.e. show that it can divide into two cells which are also able to divide.

I would apply basically the same to the other interpretation of the question: Life on Earth began when some cell (an interior separated from surrounds by some "wall") is able to make another walled cell similar to itself so there are now two of them, each with this power to reproduce themselves. One can only speculate how this happened, but many lipids surely existed in the ocean when there was no free oxygen. Some bi-polar ones naturally form mono-layer sheets (like half of the bilayer shown at bottom below):
250px-Phospholipids_aqueous_solution_structures.svg.png


Surely "zillions of times" small such sheets were rolled into tubes by the waves and often others (such as the micell shown above) helped close the ends of these tubes. As is common in human cell walls, of some "imperfections" (selective sites) in the tube's walls often happened. These sites could selectively "eat" (take to the interior) other molecules etc. and have caused their interior grow until one such enlarged structure survived being broken into two by a wave so two cells very much like the original one came into existence. etc. with evolution doing the rest to make man etc. (There are other viable ideas for the origin of life also, especially the natural organization of molecules on the 2D surface of wet crystals.)

We will never know which of the many ways life may have started is correct, but given the non-oxidizing atmosphere of early Earth and the multitude of different organic molecules that then formed in the oceans under it (and may have lasted for hundreds of years) it is not surprising that I am now here to speculate on how it happened.
 
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Billy T said:
I agree with James, post 46, except I would not claim a just fertilized egg is living. For me, it needs to be "viable" - i.e. show that it can divide into two cells which are also able to divide.

I would apply basically the same to the other interpretation of the question: Life on Earth began when some cell (an interior separated from surrounds by some "wall") is able to make another walled cell similar to itself so there are now two of them, each with this power to reproduce themselves.
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Yes, I think I would be happy that interpretation. :)
 
Y'know, it could be said that someone is not fully in control of thier own lives until they can drink, smoke, vote and have sex. It does depend on how you define life..Take a seed, for example - It can lay dormant for years, and its' life could be said to be in stasis, but still alive.
 
Thank you to everyone who has posted and please keep the posts coming!

I started this thread in hopes to have my thought reviewed and either verified or rejected based on biology and philosophy. Instead, this thread has provided nearly as many definitions and opinions on life as there are contributing members. Some conflicting opinions and beliefs held so strongly that heated debates have even been incited which I take as proof these discussions need to take place. So many policies, politics, and debates occur which are based upon definitions such as 'when life (or a life) begins.' If we as a society cannot even agree on a basic definition, how can we adequately debate issues such as abortion, human rights, etc?

Thank you again for advancing this discussion and please keep the posts coming!
 
Read-Only said:
In regards both of the statements above, the question isn't centered upon something being recognized as human life. Rather it is much more basic than that - when does life start. Therefore, I still maintain that it begins with the production of the living sperm cell and/or an egg cell. Period. :)
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Biologically that's not the beginning, sperm and egg do not originate out of non-life, they are the product of live cell division.

~Raithere
 
A fertilized egg is alive in the cell-biology sense. It's a living cell. Sperm and egg cells are alive in exactly the same sense. If we look closely at the human (or any other biological) reproductive process, there's never a single instant in which life is absent.

I think that there's only been one origin of life, seemingly way back in pre-Cambrian times, and life has been spreading into new ecological niches and elaborating continuously since then. (Actually, it's possible that there may have been several early origins of life, but apparently only one lineage has survived down to the present day.)

That implies that the search for the initial origin of life in each new generation is probably misguided, at least from the biological perspective.

But there are several closely related questions that we can ask. Each of them has a rather different answer. Which ones we choose to be definitive in things like abortion law is a matter of taste, I guess.

There's the question of when the new generation's unique genetic individuality begins. The answer to that one seems to be at cell-fertilization. The fertilized egg and all of the cells that it generates by subsequent division are all genetically distinct from the parental generation. That's a brand new genetic individual, but it isn't new life.

There's the question of when a newly forming fetus becomes viable, in the sense of being able to live on its own apart from its mother's womb. That's in late pregnancy sometime.

And there's what might be the most difficult question of them all to answer, when does a new PERSON appear? That's what I sense a lot of respondents to this thread are really thinking about and why they perceive this life question as a philosophical issue as opposed to a biological one. I'm not sure how to answer it, though I'll offer the opinion that personhood is somehow associated with reflexive awareness, with our sense of ourselves as selves. That probably appears at some time in early infancy.
 
It's possible to artificially reproduce the DNA of a primitive bacteria and
insert it into a living cell that has had it's own DNA removed thereby
creating an 'artificial' organism. I wonder how long it will be until
we are able to do this with animals or humans. This in effect is cloning a
sequenced genome, the sequence itself is held in a computer database,
so in a sense life can be stored digitally, we could one day see ourselves
uploaded onto a massively parallel quantum computer ready to be brought
back to life whenever we choose.
 
NetJaded said:
When you get your first apartment on your own.
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That is sad as in the present economic circumstance with many kids not able to leave the nest, get their own "pad," they don't get to live.
 
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