Artist: Michael Reedy
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From The Pony Fish's Glow and Other Clues to Plan and Purpose in Nature, by George C. Williams. Copyright 1997 by George C. Williams. Transmigrated from The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive
Many traditional religions foster attitudes that ought to have disappeared as biological understanding accumulated over the last century. One of these might be termed the holy-corpse fallacy. When people die, their relatives and friends behave as if there were some moral significance in the dead body. They ignore the fact that the "last remains" are just that, material that happened, at the time of death, to provide the medium of expression for a human life. However long this complex human message was expressed is the duration of time in which the materials were coming and going. The tons of matter that at one time or another were part of a dead senior citizen are already dispersed throughout the terrestrial ecosystem. A small minority of the dead person's molecules are in orbit around the earth or sun. Cremation of the matter that happened to be there at the last minute merely hastens an inevitable process.
Artist: Michael Reedy
image credit - as above
The holy-corpse fallacy once had support from the biological concept of protoplasm, the special living matter of an organism. Other matter may be entering and leaving a living cell, but it's protoplasm was presumably a stable entity that regulated this material flux. A dead person may have dead protoplasm, but it was presumably that person's very own protoplasm, and had been throughout his or her life. Protoplasm was often discussed in the biology courses I took in the 1940s. It is a term almost never heard today.
Another error is the moment-of-conception fallacy. The joining of a human egg and sperm defines a new and unique human genotype. It does not produce any human hopes and fears and memories or anything else of moral importance implied by the term human. The newly fertilized egg may have the potential for a fully human existence, but that potential was there even before fertilization. The same can be said of all the fertilizations that might have been. The penetration of that egg by one sperm meant an early death for millions of competing sperm. It destroyed all hope for those millions of other unique human genotypes.
Artist: Michael Reedy
image credit - as above
The moment-of-conception fallacy implies that fertilization is a simple process with never a doubt as to whether it has or has not happened. In reality, the "moment" is a matter of some hours of complex activity. There are elaborate biochemical interactions between the sperm and various layers of the egg membrane. The sperm gradually breaks up, and only its nucleus is established in the egg. Then both egg and sperm nuclei initiate radical changes before the fusion of the two nuclei. Many of the developmental events following this fusion were predetermined during the production of the egg. Genes provided by the sperm do not have discernible effects until embryonic development is well under way. A strictly biological definition of humanity would have to specify some point in this elaborate program at which the egg and sperm have suddenly been endowed with a single human life.
Who moved my cheese Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator?
Artist: Michael Paulus
There are other difficulties with defining humanity this way. If that single human life develops for a while and then divides to produce identical twins or triplets, are they to be considered one human being? This would be contrary to almost everyone's moral sensibilities. Recent observations have raised additional questions about the connection between biological and moral individuality. Early in development, fraternal twins from two separate, fertilized eggs may fuse and develop into what, at birth, is physically a single baby. Molecular techniques available today may show that such an individual is genetically different in various parts of its body. An apparently normal woman may have some genetically male tissues from what originated as her twin brother, or vice versa. The only realistic view is that a human life arises gradually, which is not much help in making personal decisions or devising public policy.
Frango ut patefaciam
~I break in order to reveal~
Artist: Michael Reedy
Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was among the best known and widely read scientists of the late 20th century. A palaeontologist and educator at Harvard University, Gould made his largest contributions to science as the leading spokes-person for evolutionary theory. His monthly columns in Natural History magazine and his popular works on evolution have earned him numerous awards and one of the largest readerships in the popular-science genre — penning altogether over twenty successful books throughout his career.
On this website you will find articles by Gould and his colleagues focusing on the finer points of his work, the nature of life's evolution, and the general ontogeny of evolutionary theory.
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