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| | A Little Urbanity: I, Zygote |
 | | Some have proposed that zygotes, and their more advanced brethren, embryos, have no claim to the rest of their lives because they lack nerves, brains, consciousness, etc. But we perform painful and death-dealing experiments on all sorts of creatures (e.g., rats, rabbits, primates) that are fully sentient, and perhaps self-aware. |
 | | I argued that the particular genome that contributes to my individuality was present and functioning at my zygotic stage and not before, and that it was functioning in a distinctly human way even at that stage of my development. |
 | | Ryan, I have argued that a zygote is an identifiably human, genetically distinct, functioning organism whose activities and potentialities are such that its course of development is continuous with that of the lifespan of a normally developing person, or rather, are a continuous part of that development. |
| littleurbanity.blogspot.com /2005/05/i-zygote.html (4184 words) |
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