Fixed species. Dogs are dogs. Cats are cats.
Human beings are human beings; not chimpanzees.
I think I learned that in Sunday School.
It is not that anybody talked about species
in Sunday School: they talked about God,
and how wonderful he wer't. Nevertheless,
I think I learned then that there was something special
about being a human being. We had souls, for instance.
Nobody ever saw a soul, and I know that people
used to try to calculate just when a soul left a body,
and even how much a soul might weigh.
Nonsense! All nonsense!
It was not until Aretha Franklin that I learned
that some people have soul, but not souls.
I know now that people were just trying to find ways
to explain that human beings were absolutely
and forever different from all other animals.
Fixed species. Right from the beginning.
And we were special; very special.
It is extremely difficult to get rid of the notion of fixed species.
One hundred and fifty years after coming to know that
all life has evolved, that we are part of a process, the result
of a process of becoming--not being--we still talk as if
there were absolute and eternal definitions of what we are.
Right now, socially and politically and religiously,
people still debate as if we were clay pots, created
by a creative potter, or a potter-creator.
Consider what it is to be a human being.
Several millions of years ago, small variations
in genetic structure produced ancestors to both
the apes and humans that made adaptation to
the conditions they found themselves in, either
more beneficial, or less beneficial, resulting in
a kind of weeding-out process. Some variants
thrived here; others there. Some could not adapt.
We have common ancestors; not just the apes
and we, but all living things. OK, maybe we
aren't related to a few fumerole critters!
The rest of them are part of our family tree.
Even what it means to be an individual human being
is not something fixed. It is a development.
A sperm is not a human being. An ovum is not a person.
They contain the information that can develop
into what we are, but they are not people. They are
what begins the process of becoming people.
When sperm and ova combine, they start to develop,
dividing and dividing, and eventually differentiating
what some day will become skin cells, and eyes,
and feet and hearts. But, at first, they are just
undifferentiated copies of the information that makes us.
Sometimes the blastocyst divides in two, and the result
may become twins. If all goes well, some day there
will be two people. Sometimes the blastocysts recombine.
Nobody says that two human beings became one human
being. We say the blastocysts recombined. We say it
that way because we know it is a process; a development
that results in human beings. When a baby is born--"baby"
is the name we give to human development at the time
of birth--the baby is far along in becoming a person,
but still there is much that has to happen. Brain connections
are still being made. Eyes develop. Bones are still knitting.
The business of becoming a person goes on for years.
Our current debate about abortion, for instance,
and what to do when one has to choose between
a mother and a fetus (another, earlier stage of becoming
a baby and a person) is thoroughly confounded
by the tenacious notion that there are fixed species.
You either are a human being, or you are not: period!
Arbitrarily, the moment of becoming is set at fertilization.
The confounding result is that, if it has to be all or nothing,
then the biological packet of genetic information that
is a fertilized egg is a human person; then a mass of
undifferentiated cells--copies of that fertilization--
are human persons. And that is nonsense!
It takes time to become a human person. There is no
"Not-now/Now!" moment. The longer the process goes,
the closer we get to becoming what we are.
At no point is human development trivial, but the
plain facts are that what is true today was not true
yesterday, and what will become tomorrow will be
much more than what is true now. Development
does not have arbitrary fixed moments at which
one can say, "This is a person!". It creeps up.
Nature recognizes, somehow, that very often
the development of, not just human beings, but
of all such fetuses, that things go wrong, and expels
the fetus. We don't say, aborts. We say miscarries!
It may be that nearly half of all human fertilizations
are miscarried. Whatever the number, it is huge!
The either/or assumptions we still carry in our heads
screw up most of the conversations we have about
the value of human life, or even when we have human life.
It is not either/or. The development of egg and ovum
to birth, and beyond, to our individual deaths, is
a long, complex, process. It takes time to become.
It takes time to recognize what development means.
There are no billboard answers to questions of ethics.
Human beings are human beings; not chimpanzees.
I think I learned that in Sunday School.
It is not that anybody talked about species
in Sunday School: they talked about God,
and how wonderful he wer't. Nevertheless,
I think I learned then that there was something special
about being a human being. We had souls, for instance.
Nobody ever saw a soul, and I know that people
used to try to calculate just when a soul left a body,
and even how much a soul might weigh.
Nonsense! All nonsense!
It was not until Aretha Franklin that I learned
that some people have soul, but not souls.
I know now that people were just trying to find ways
to explain that human beings were absolutely
and forever different from all other animals.
Fixed species. Right from the beginning.
And we were special; very special.
It is extremely difficult to get rid of the notion of fixed species.
One hundred and fifty years after coming to know that
all life has evolved, that we are part of a process, the result
of a process of becoming--not being--we still talk as if
there were absolute and eternal definitions of what we are.
Right now, socially and politically and religiously,
people still debate as if we were clay pots, created
by a creative potter, or a potter-creator.
Consider what it is to be a human being.
Several millions of years ago, small variations
in genetic structure produced ancestors to both
the apes and humans that made adaptation to
the conditions they found themselves in, either
more beneficial, or less beneficial, resulting in
a kind of weeding-out process. Some variants
thrived here; others there. Some could not adapt.
We have common ancestors; not just the apes
and we, but all living things. OK, maybe we
aren't related to a few fumerole critters!
The rest of them are part of our family tree.
Even what it means to be an individual human being
is not something fixed. It is a development.
A sperm is not a human being. An ovum is not a person.
They contain the information that can develop
into what we are, but they are not people. They are
what begins the process of becoming people.
When sperm and ova combine, they start to develop,
dividing and dividing, and eventually differentiating
what some day will become skin cells, and eyes,
and feet and hearts. But, at first, they are just
undifferentiated copies of the information that makes us.
Sometimes the blastocyst divides in two, and the result
may become twins. If all goes well, some day there
will be two people. Sometimes the blastocysts recombine.
Nobody says that two human beings became one human
being. We say the blastocysts recombined. We say it
that way because we know it is a process; a development
that results in human beings. When a baby is born--"baby"
is the name we give to human development at the time
of birth--the baby is far along in becoming a person,
but still there is much that has to happen. Brain connections
are still being made. Eyes develop. Bones are still knitting.
The business of becoming a person goes on for years.
Our current debate about abortion, for instance,
and what to do when one has to choose between
a mother and a fetus (another, earlier stage of becoming
a baby and a person) is thoroughly confounded
by the tenacious notion that there are fixed species.
You either are a human being, or you are not: period!
Arbitrarily, the moment of becoming is set at fertilization.
The confounding result is that, if it has to be all or nothing,
then the biological packet of genetic information that
is a fertilized egg is a human person; then a mass of
undifferentiated cells--copies of that fertilization--
are human persons. And that is nonsense!
It takes time to become a human person. There is no
"Not-now/Now!" moment. The longer the process goes,
the closer we get to becoming what we are.
At no point is human development trivial, but the
plain facts are that what is true today was not true
yesterday, and what will become tomorrow will be
much more than what is true now. Development
does not have arbitrary fixed moments at which
one can say, "This is a person!". It creeps up.
Nature recognizes, somehow, that very often
the development of, not just human beings, but
of all such fetuses, that things go wrong, and expels
the fetus. We don't say, aborts. We say miscarries!
It may be that nearly half of all human fertilizations
are miscarried. Whatever the number, it is huge!
The either/or assumptions we still carry in our heads
screw up most of the conversations we have about
the value of human life, or even when we have human life.
It is not either/or. The development of egg and ovum
to birth, and beyond, to our individual deaths, is
a long, complex, process. It takes time to become.
It takes time to recognize what development means.
There are no billboard answers to questions of ethics.
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