So I just listened to a recent edition of Radio Lab about bioengineering and chimeras and the possibilities of blending genes, and in the show was this really amazingly cool story. Basically, this woman they interview needed a kidney transplant. (That’s not the cool part.) They go to family members first, of course, and they tested their DNA for a match. And they found that her sons…..were not her sons. They were her husband’s sons, but they weren’t a genetic match to her. So they retested her, same result. So they desperately tested a lot of different tissues around her body, after she demonstrated that she did in fact give birth to these boys, and they found out that the reason for all this was some of her body had one set of DNA and another had another. Her blood had one, but her reproductive system had another.
I felt bad for the lady. Obviously, this whole situation unnerved her and rattled her to the bone, and it’s too bad. I can’t help but think that if I found out that I’ve got the genetic material to make two people, I’d be stoked.* What great cocktail party banter! You could probably convince people you had superpowers and shit. I don’t truck with the more superstitious need to have individuality strongly defined in religious or biological terms—a person is a social construct that I think is best defined around the concept of the lived experience of having your consciousness and your body and your memories. But most people probably don’t think very much about the constructed nature of identity, and thus a revelation like this was pretty rattling. Most people think what you are is what you are, that your race and ethnicity and gender are set in stone and that your unique personhood is something special. But really, it’s not. Human beings are what we socially define them to be, and the boundaries can be blurred as the social understandings of these things are blurred.
And of course, the biology. For those who find these sort of oddities fascinating, you’ve probably already guessed what happened to this woman. When her mother was pregnant, she was initially pregnant with fraternal twins. At the embryonic stage, the two fused together, a process that often results in Siamese twins. In this case, the twinning happened on the level of organs, with some being made by one set of DNA and some being made by the other set. Her sons were actually her sons, of course, but they were just made by one twin half of her body. We like to think of Siamese twins as being two sets of individuals fused together, but more often, that’s not what happens. If a Siamese twin body is like this, or one fetus is absorbed into the body of the other that was born, or if the twin is split from the waist down and has three legs instead of two heads, we understand that person as one person. Only if there are two unique brains—two unique consciousnesses, that is—do we understand that there are two people.
I usually don’t really like addressing the whole anti-choice argument that abortion is wrong because it’s killing a person, because I’ve come to realize that attempts to ban abortion are linked to attempts to ban contraception and sex education, so it’s more about sex than babies. However, this story reminded me of Pam’s awesome post about the “Human Life Amendment” that would define a fertilized egg as a person. Pam listed out some ridiculous conclusions that you have to logically draw from the idea that a woman could be carrying a “baby” before she’s even pregnant, and this particular case points to how stupid an idea it is to define personhood by measures outside the commonly accepted one, which is that we have one conscious brain, we have one person. The argument that a fetus is a person before it has a brain is based in a religious notion that we have souls, so of course, that argument has to be excused from the attempts to ban abortion, due to the separation of church and state. So the hope is that they can somehow define conception as ensoulment, but from a secular perspective, with a complete set of DNA being substituted for the soul that’s apparently injected with the sperm.
But this case shows why that’s not going to work. In the spirit of Pam’s post: Is this woman two women? Is her husband a polygamist? Does she get two votes? Do her sons have two mothers? Does that make her a lesbian mother? Since the other mother is her sister, is that lesbian incestuous motherhood? Does she have to pay two admissions to the movies? Buy two tickets on the plane? And of course: Does she get to ride in the HOV lane by herself?
No, of course not. And nor are identical twins—people who were one fertilized egg (and therefore one “person” under the Human Life Amendment) at first—just half a person each. They are full people. One brain, one person. I’m semi-surprised this argument doesn’t come up more often. Probably because those who believe that a fertilized egg is a person aren’t probably quick enough on the uptake to see why these examples undermine their argument in a fundamental way.
*No doubt further evidence to the Pap smear fans of the world that I’m an immoral harlot.
93 Responses to “My hands are mine, but my feet are my sister”
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Science is so frakkin’ cool.
Mmm, fried unfertilized genetic material.
Reality has a lovely way of being more complicated than what the anti-choicers give it credit for.
What’s more frightening his how a lot of folks justify personhood on fetuses by gluing some modern biology here and there while attaching theory on souls from millenia ago.
Is it just too sad that I first learned of chimeras from an episode of House?
At the embryonic stage, the two fused together, a process that often results in Siamese twins.
Um, no. Conjoined twins aren’t fused together - they are the result of identical twins that never completely separated. They are also genetically identical.
This is a case where there was an early fusion of two embryos and it somehow worked out as a whole person through a division of labor in the germ cell lines. In other words, her spinal cord may have descended from one of the embryos, her reproductive organs from another, and so on with all of the epithelial cells, etc.
Oh, and what is going to happen now that Brittney and Abby Hensel are reaching the age of majority - they can drive, ride a bike, skate, etc. …. but will they be allowed to marry??? They are two girls above the waist, one girl below.
I never heard of this phenomenon before.
I wonder if it is kinda like the calico cat. With genes for fur color from both the father and the mother, some parts of the body develop the fathers color, others the mother.
WHICH GENES did the look at?
mash up human! It’s the way to the future. wooo….
tho’ I still think glow in the dark baby would be the party darling.
Sorry, two WOMEN above the waist, one woman below. They just turned 18!
I think the state where they live (Indiana) has one of those odious “one man one woman” laws.
Not a related phenomenon. Calicos have one set of DNA (two of each chromosome), the same set in all of their cells. In some cells, the X chromosome from the father is deactivated by epigenetic regulatory proteins and the color from the mother is expressed in those cells. In other cells, the opposite happens.
Chimeras have two sets of DNA. But any given cell has only one set of DNA.
WOW, that is amazing!
OT: Amanda, I ordered your book tonight, and when I refreshed the Amazon.com page, it said “Only 1 left in stock–order soon (more on the way).” Looks like your book is a hit.
I heard that episode of Radio Lab! Science is, just as teac said, so frakkin’ cool.
Oh, and what is going to happen now that Brittney and Abby Hensel are reaching the age of majority - they can drive, ride a bike, skate, etc. …. but will they be allowed to marry??? They are two girls above the waist, one girl below.
I was going to argue that the Hilton sisters (no, not Paris and Nikki) were allowed to marry, but it turns out they were turned down by 21 states.
And yet Eng and Chang Bunker were allowed to marry sisters. Stupid patriarchy.
The obvious answer, of course, is to prosecute this woman for murder, fry her and send her to hell. She not only ate her sister, she consumed her soul!
Another fun fact about calico (and tortoiseshell) cats: they are almost always female. If a male does pop up, he’s always sterile.
Generally speaking, if the domestic cat you’re looking at has three or more colors in its fur, it’s a female.
Someone’s going to wonder. The males are sterile because they are XXY. This also makes them prone to health problems, so they need extra love. (But that’s easy, because there’s more of them to love…)
Ms Kate, on the show they said that Siamese twins can result from two embryos fusing together. But yes, they also and probably more commonly result from identicals that don’t split completely.
**She not only ate her sister, she consumed her soul!
Didn’t that just happen to Liz Lemon?
I’ve been wondering about ensoulment of identical twins for *years*, and wondering why the anti-abortion people just can’t seem to get around to addressing it.
Also, did you know that so-called “partial birth” abortion is the method of choice when one fetus in a twin pregnancy is dead/dying, and you want to get it out without hurting the other twin? But AFAIK there is no exception for “life of the other twin” in the laws against it.
My conclusion: fundamentalists hate twins.
There is a type of twin that results from fusion, but it lacks the symmetry of conjoined twins - they show up when people have another body hanging out of them or off of them.
I’ve not heard of true “siamese” or conjoined twins occurring from a fusion - this wouldn’t result in the symmetry seen in those who are born.
With two souls, maybe she has superpowers or something. Where’s Professor Xavier when you need him?…
“Conjoined twins aren’t fused together”
Depends on wheter the twins started off as one embryo that failed to split or if the two twins were in the process of absorbing. More likely a splotting that went wrong since it’s more likely you would get parastic twins by incomplete absorbtion.
In parastitic twins the only noticeable part of the other twin is often a body part such as an arm or leg outside the host twin. Now this could be as a result of a failed seperation not likely or an absortion very likely in which one twin absorbed the other.
There is also another rare manisfestation of this phenemon where you actually have the embryo of the other twin inside your body without you realizing it. This is a complete absorbtion and happens pretty early in the pregnancy. It’s pretty rare as far as science knows. Usually it takes an ultrasound or other bodily scan or autopsy to find the embryo in the person. Usually woman are affected.
House? You should watch the Venture Bros there the twin came out of the guy after living inside him all his life.
Okay, so I looked it up and there are competing theories now. Things change! I’m still not sure how they would split, twin, then fuse back with as much symmetry as they do. Perhaps the epigenetic development cascades organize growth in symmetric fashion and it can only work if it happens early.
That’s because identical twins have no souls!!!
This happened to my dad. He had a weird shadow on a brain scan, and eventually they figured out that it was the absorbed remains of a twin.
That’s one of the reasons I just can’t get behind a ban on abortion: human reproduction is much, much, much weirder than the “pro-life” people would have you believe.
Today’s brand-new research: identical twins are not actually identical.
I may be wrong about this, but I heard somewhere that a mother can gain different DNA as well from the foetus. Sometimes cells will migrate from the foetus, growing inside the mother, basicly making themselves at home, and vice versa with the cild. So her sons could have their own DNA, and then in small patches some of that DNA from her reproductive system.
Ain’t that just fucking cool?
Identical twins are mostly identical. There are fingerprint differences, retina differances small but they are there. Also as identical twins get older they start to look different although that takes longer and has some environmental factors involved. It takes some sophiscated testing to determine who is who but it can be done.
Still identical twins are as identical as two people can be.
Do you also support embryonic stem cell research?
Something people don’t realize is that the research in addition to finding ways stems can be used for medicine without the use of embryos as well as to how embryos form. So we could find ways to prevent lots of spontaneous abortions because we fix what would cause it and also fix the errors that can occur during development. Also the embryos used were ones that were going to be thrown anyway. You have to look at things logically not use emotion.
I had to laugh at those people who think Mel Gibson knows jack about embryonic stem cell research because embryonic stem cells were only discovered a decade ago not 30 years like anti embroynic stem cell research people claim. Also stem cell research has resulted in medical cures that can help people. A bone marrow transplant is a stem cell transplant. Adult but still stem cells.
Okay that was off topic but still revelant to bring up I think.
” may be wrong about this, but I heard somewhere that a mother can gain different DNA as well from the foetus. ”
Unless a virus is involved I don’t really think that is possible or it would be extremely rare.
A mother can have a different blood type then the fetus which can result in some life threating complications. Perhaps that is what you are thinking about?
I think Catt may be thinking of fetal cells (not DNA) found in the mother even years after giving birth.
Catt is right. It’s called fetomaternal microchimerism. It is “very common” but I couldn’t tell you if that means 0.5%, 50% or 99% of pregnancies. Probably another Pandagonian knows?
hanna, the cells have DNA in them, so both statements are correct
I just read your link. That is really wild, especially the links with autoimmune diseases. Are autoimmune diseases more common in women? Or is that just my perception based on people I know who have them?
Probably a hell of a lot more expensive and potentially more dangerous to the mother than just letting the spontaneous abortion occur and trying again.
You have to do both. Emotions are part of basis for values, and as such are integral to moral philosophy. Meanie atheists should be the first to challenge anti-emotionalism, as we’re so often wrongly accused of it.
yes, by 3-to-1
“Probably a hell of a lot more expensive and potentially more dangerous to the mother than just letting the spontaneous abortion occur and trying again.”
Not neccesarily. At first yes you have to remember that both diseases and enviromental effects such as toxins, industrial pollutants can cause deformities leading to sponanteous abortions or birth defects. Correcting such defects while the fetus is still forming would be of great benefit to humans.
As for fetal cells from what I can recall it’s that the mother just has cells transfered from the fetus to her and vice versa. It’s like a blood transfusion and makes sense due to the emblical cord. The mothers cells are found in the fetus as well and after birth if she breastfeeds. The dna itself doesn’t transfer like when a virus invades an organism then invades another transplating a few genes.
As for autoimmune the immune system of the mother gets lowered during pregnancy otherwise the act of pregnancy would not be able to take place. The species would not be able to procreate. Now this can have consequences for both the mother and fetus. Vulernability to disease for example. There is a parasite in cat litter that can cause a mother to miscarry hence why pregnant women shouldn’t change cat litter. After the pregnancy is over the immune system goes back to normal usually. Whenever a body undergoes such massive changes the possibility of error increases.
“Is it just too sad that I first learned of chimeras from an episode of House?
No sadder than me learning it on CSI. (”Bloodlines”, Season 4)
Aha! I found what I was thinking of earlier: there are now apparently three kinds of twins: identical, fraternal, and semi-identical.
The article says that though this is the first known case, no one can quite be sure how common it is since they only found this out accidentally while looking at other genetic problems.
IIRC, I learned about it from some other show (L&O SVU, maybe), and then when I saw the episode of CSI, I immediately knew what the “ah-ha” was going to be.
So no, it’s not weird to have learned it from House …
Fun and exciting stuff.
Usually true, but there are some calico chimeras. If you ever see a male calico, for instance, it’s a chimera.
Very, very bad idea. The primary reason for spontaneous abortions is mutation in critical genes like the Hox family or the ones on the X chromosome that trigger major developmental changes. There’s no way to prevent these since, unlike men, females are born with all of their gametes. Unless you’re keen on delivering a nondescript blob of flesh or something with five arms and no brain, I’d suggest leaving spontaneous abortion alone
Five minutes ago I would have said “no, all calicos are mosaics, and the males all have XXY chromosomes, Klinefelter’s syndrome.”
You prompted me to look further and I see it is possible to have calico chimeras. They can be XX/XX (female) or XX/XY (these could be male or female depending on which cell lineage produces the sexual organs). I would imagine there could also be XY/XY (always male) but I haven’t found anyone talking about these.
The XX/XY males can be calicos, and they can breed. But these chimeras are rare compared to the XXY mosaics, and that’s why cat people will usually tell you that calico males are always sterile. Hardly anybody comes across the breeding male calicos; they are practically a legend.
So, it isn’t always true that “the males are sterile because they are XXY,” nor is it true that “if you ever see a male calico, for instance, it’s a chimera.” Both occur.
Fuckin’ life, being weird, making me wrong! Grrr.
On conjoined and identical twins.
Daisy and Violet Hilton were a type of joining that was easily separated, at the hip. Each was a complete person on her own, and they shared only a circulatory system.
Change and Eng Bunker were joined only by a strip of cartilege at the sternum.
In both of these cases, each twin would be able to have a spouse and sex life of their own.
The Hensels are more complicated, since they share the lower torso.
(I’ve read too much on conjoined twins. Just finished a freak-show novel)
As for the ensoulment of identicals, this puzzles a lot of “separate DNA=separate person” pro-lifers.
They tend to look at me funny when I remind them that soul comes with breath, per Genesis 2:7.
Chimeras throw them into a total tizzy.
“The primary reason for spontaneous abortions is mutation in critical genes like the Hox family or the ones on the X chromosome that trigger major developmental changes.”
Notice you forgot the fix part. Fixing those errors would be of vast importance. Pollution, poor diet, other factors can impact during early pregnancy and cause defects. Embryonic stem cell research could tell how to reverse those defects.
Surely your not opposed to reversing damage done by mercury contamination if the mother eats a contaminated fish which is a very concern.
Did the freak show novel show the parastic twins in which the freak show guys had two additional legs from a partially absorbed twin?
It’s interesting that even though we think those people were exploited they often made a lot of money and admitted they liked doing it because outside of the freak show they were just freaks mistreated by society.
Once joining the freak show they got a measure of status and fame.
Yuri: I’m sure I’ll be blogging “30 Rock” once our DVD watching has caught up. I love that show and, like everyone worth knowing, want to make out with Tina Fey.
You have to look at things logically not use emotion.
This is arguing semantics, but I think it’s an important point: Too often the word “emotional” is incorrectly used as a synonym for “irrational”, and I think that needs to end. Because what it does is allows people to dismiss the logic of an argument because the arguer has an emotional invest. Ironically, dismissing an argument’s points because the speaker is emotional is irrational and probably some cousin to ad hominem. (At least for now, though conservatives are quickly trying to redefine “ad hominem” as “disagreeing with a conservative”.)
There’s probably a post in this, because I think the conflation of these two separate things has the counter problem of letting people dismiss rationality because it’s, in their eyes, cold and unemotional. Which is probably the origin of those weighty-sounding but intellectually iight arguments about how science and rationality are tools to shut out certain voices. Rationality is a friend of the oppressed. What is not their friend is the argument that emotional investment=irrational.
Oddly enough, I had heard of this sort of thing. My mom’s best friend from high school/ maid of honor had an internal “tumor” removed (discovered when she was in her 20’s) that turned out to be an undeveloped “twin”.
Hmmm, now going back… does this removal mean she aborted her own sibling?
Easy - the left hand, or “sinister” twin, is always the evil one.
So - what happened to her kidney transplant?
Thanks, Dunc- I’m the kid of a left-handed twin (and yes, his older brother is right-handed)!
Just call me Louise, Eldest Daughter of Beelzebub, I guess…
Keep in mind also that there are (once were?) cultures where it is considered perfectly acceptable to keep the first twin to emerge and abandon the second.
Also remember the bible story about Jacob and Esau — Esau was delivered first and thus according to ancient tradition was the one to inherit the ‘birthright’, whereas Jacob, even though he was ‘better’ (for reasons that make no sense to me, considering that the Bible paints him as a pretty despicable individual, and the only mark against Esau seems to be that he was, like, really crass or ‘trashy’ or had a slightly less groovy name or something). God, however, chose Jacob and enabled him to steal the inheritance by swindling Esau and lying to their father.
Thus proving that obvs twins hella suck, yo, and Yahweh clearly has the character judgement of your average preteen girl. Not to mention he must not really be that powerful, considering he couldn’t even get his chosen patriarch into the womb solo, or at least get him out first, or even, heck, put some kind of Jedi Mind Trick on everyone rather than making Jacob have to steal and lie and generally act like a dick to get what God apparently wanted him to have in the first place.
Dooooooo iiiiiit…..
Easy - the left hand, or “sinister” twin, is always the evil one.
Oh, don’t look so surprised.
(Though that episode also makes me want to start singing, “Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads …”)
Wow. Did this twinning result in any anamlous organ distribution?? Things like, say, 3 kidneys or something?
So-no Stephen King fans at Pandagon?
I lived with an SK fan. I just got rid of all those books when I moved, but I’d be lying if I claimed I never enjoyed any of them.
I refer of course to The Dark Half.
“So-no Stephen King fans at Pandagon?”
I’m a fan, despite the popularity. And I will admit it IRL. Still own a large number of the books. I’m not that much of a literature snob. Finally finished the Dark Tower series last year…
However, I didn’t read The Dark Half, although I am roughly acquainted with the basic storyline…
The question here at Pandagon is whether our Internet Literature Snob, Ms. Marcotte, has soiled her mind with Stephen King’s scribblings…
:)
“Easy - the left hand, or “sinister” twin, is always the evil one.”
Oh sure, just more hate for us lefties from the dextrarchy…
One of my landlords had a “calico male” who was sterile, but then again he (the cat, not the landlord) was what the town vet called a “hermaphrodite”. So I guess he was XXY…
(The cat’s name—I’m not kidding—was “Oscar the Wilde cat”.
Dude- I’m from Maine…
Here’s a shot I just found of Stephen King’s front gate- in RL, it is so damned COOL!!! And seeing the guy walking through the Bangor Mall is surreal- he’s so tall.
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tips/getAttraction.php?tip_AttractionNo==4462
MikeEss- remember, lefties are the only ones in their right mind!
“So-no Stephen King fans at Pandagon?”
I was just going to bring that up. One of his creepier novels, I thought.
“MikeEss- remember, lefties are the only ones in their right mind!”
Damn straight!…or not…
louise, O.T., but did you write a diary as Pam’s place about a Maine kid killed in Iraq?…
Yeah, I did, MikeEss. Seems strange to write something so serious- doesn’t come naturally to me!
That now makes 2 war dead that I knew personally- the other was a soldier turned independant contractor, who died back in June 2004 (he was 39 at the time and a year ahead of me in HS). He was driving when a bullet pierced the vehicle and hit him in the chest- was able to get the other 3 people to safety before he died. Both of them also from my dinky lil hometown and graduates of the same high school…
Just put up my 4th diary over there (this one about cops tasering each other at a bachelor party); am rather enjoying putting these diaries together!
“That now makes 2 war dead that I knew personally- the other was a soldier turned independant contractor, who died back in June 2004 (he was 39 at the time and a year ahead of me in HS).”
It was nice and poignant, and I thought for a moment it would be the kind of thing that might soften a wingnut’s tiny heart and help them see how evil our actions in Iraq really are.
And then I realized they don’t HAVE hearts…
Aigh! Someone else who holds teh arcane knowledge of teh blogs!
How the frig do you do that linky-red thing??? Where you can type in essentially your own editorial phrase and when someone clicks on it, up comes the linked page? C’mon; help me get this damned Luddite Cloak of Shame off once and for all!
And thanks for the kind words…
Too many people have been killed, maimed, injured, displaced in both of these wars and on both sides of the battlefields- and why? What has been gained? When is it enough? I’d like to quietly and calmly ask every single person who still supports the wars that one question- WHY?
Jeffrey, genetic mutations/errors only cause about 50% of spontaneous abortions. Clotting problems, autoimmune issues, cord problems, placenta issues, maternal hormonal problems (luteal phase defect, hypothyroidism) etc. cause the rest.
HTML Anchor (link) Tag:
<a href=”http://somelink.you.want.to.insert”>Text to show as link</a>
…
let’s see if i got it
dammit strike one let’s try again
Bwahahahaha!
…
There’s a guy who lives near my office who is a dead ringer for SK. The first few times I thought it was him (it’s not unusual to see literary world celebrities ’round here), until I realized that he lives in Maine and is really not the downtown Manhattan type.
I heard about the woman who wasn’t a genetic match to her sons on some cable show. The other story featured on that episode was a single woman with two small children by the same man. When she applied for public aid, the agency mandated DNA testing and informed her that while the children certainly were related to her ex-boyfriend, they weren’t hers. She was interrogated as if she were perpetrating fraud, trying to get money by claiming someone else’s kids as her own. The welfare agency was not hip to the possibility of chimerism and thus was not very nice to this woman, who was in fact a chimera.
“She was interrogated as if she were perpetrating fraud, trying to get money by claiming someone else’s kids as her own. ”
That does happen though. Often enough that they were finally forced to implement dna testing to cut down on the attempts. You should hear the stories of people scamming public aid by claiming kids who weren’t theres either by marriage, adoption or birth.
Chimerism is very rare and most have no idea what it is.
It makes perfect sense that they would investigate her harshly.
“Bwahahahaha!”
Uh oh. Maybe you’ve been TOO empowered…
The odd thing is that the woman seeking aid could have been a chimera and tested the same as her kids … IF the buccal (cheek swab) cell line had originated from the same early cells as her reproductive organs.
50% chance of those epithelial and germ cells matching.
There is a phenomenon known as “mosaicism” where a child appears to have Down Syndrome, but doesn’t exhibit the developmental delays because their nervous system and brain tissues don’t contain trisomy DNA. This can be a chimera situation, or it can be that the fated trisomy occurred at an early level of cell division in the person themselves and not in the parental germ cells.
Eh, that’s mosaic Down syndrome.
“Mosaicism” is a much more general term for having more than one set of genetic material that branches from a single zygote (whereas chimeras branch from more than one zygote). It doesn’t necessarily have detrimental effects.
tootiredoftheright,
I was unclear. I just finished WRITING a novel set in a freak show. I’ve read about parasitic twins that were displayed, but my Alice and Dinah are just garden-variety conjoined at the waist, three legs between the two.
I caught the Stephen King reference, but I just got in from work, so first chance to comment on it. The Dark half is definitely one of the creepier ones.
Amamda, I am not sure how the thread got to
but you are damn straight it is worth a post in its own right. When you find a newsy hook hang it on, I hope the post is a doozie.You have two things at least going on in your comment #43 and I’d gladly read your expansion of either. But a particular and ironic example of the ploy of dismissing an argument because it seems to have been delivered in an “emotional” tone, and one drenched in sexist overtones, is the dismayingly typical argumentation of couples. You will surely have heard “women get so emotional” leveled at your own self in some form during your life. Its a meal ticket for couples therapists and not least of all because outside of the therapy session, the rest of the culture is supporting the myths of “more emotional = less rational and guess which gender we mean by that”. I see a different irony than you are indicating because my own experience informs me that a guy trying to act like he is not upset calls everyone else for getting upset.
In a very different context, I saw the same problem of discounting any emotional delivery as voiding its content:
Wow wow wow. Science IS frackin’ cool. *is amazed and intrigued by all of this, especially Grammar RWA’s knowledge on the subject*
Humans? Are freaky and cool.
(”Fearfully & wonderfully made”?)
Grammar RWA, that last site you liked to says all women are mosaics. Really??
Nenya,
think of it this way. Women have two X chromosomes. Men only have one. But both sexes are viable. That doesn’t happen with any other double or half count of a chromosome. It’s just too many underdose/overdose of gene products.
The way most mammals get around that is to turn off an X chromosome in every cell that has two fairly early in development.
So all women not living with Turners Syndrome have roughly half their cells with the father’s X chromosome active and half with the mom’s. IIRC, there are cases of biased inactivation. Not sure why.
X-mosaicism is a plausible hypothesis for causing the sex differential in most autoimmune diseases.
This is wrong. Doubly so if you thought you were making a secular argument there. Separation of church and state doesn’t preclude arguments made from a religious standpoint. Otherwise we’d have to demand (nearly) all politicians act against their own personal views.
Well, if we’re going to play Cool Science Tricks, how about this: One Child, Two Fathers — marmoset style. Marmosets normally bear fraternal twins. The twins are usually chimeras, and they seems to be *germ-line* chimeras — that is, it’s not just that my hands and feet are different people, but my children have two mommies — and two daddies. As David Haig explains in What Is a Marmoset?, our usual boxes for thinking about what is an individual and who are they related to have to be reconfigured to deal with marmosets.
Most scientists don’t think it’s coincidental that marmosets are often polyandrous cooperative breeders, with one female being mated with two (or more) males, each of whom helps out with the babies.
It’s nature’s way!
While I wait for my link-laden comment to get out of limbo, haven’t any believers in the ensoulment of fertilized eggs ever addressed the question of identical twins?
Do they believe:
A. a second soul appears when the embryo splits; if they later recombine, someone has died
B. a second soul appears when God knows the embryo has split for good
C. they only arise when the egg got two souls in the first place
D. one twin has a soul, the other is EVIL
? Come on, *someone* must have asked the question!
It’s not that the argument is made from a religious standpoint. It’s that the argument is made based on a religious belief that would then be imposed on people who may not share that belief.
Should Orthodox Jews be allowed to have the sale of bacon and ham legally banned across the country because their religious beliefs say it’s forbidden by God? Similarly, if someone believes that abortion should be banned because the fetus has a soul, why should that ban be imposed on someone who does not hold that same religious belief?
“Otherwise we’d have to demand (nearly) all politicians act against their own personal views. ”
Well considering how many violations of the First Amendment were put various laws around this country as time went by with most of them dating to the 1950s it’s about time we do demand that politicans follow the law and not impose their own personal views on this country.
We may not require a religious test but a history of the various laws and how they came about should be tested of any candiadate to public office.
Far too often these supposed lawmakers who should know the law pass and then have their unconstitional laws squashed while being told numerous times that was going to be the result.
Case in point laws that try to ban video game sales or make it a crime if a game or movie has violent or sexual content.
Do they believe:
A. a second soul appears when the embryo splits; if they later recombine, someone has died
B. a second soul appears when God knows the embryo has split for good
C. they only arise when the egg got two souls in the first place
D. one twin has a soul, the other is EVIL
If I believed in souls, I would suggest that one soul splits into two and that the two souls can rejoin like beads of water. If a cell can split into two and make two cells just like itself, why couldn’t a soul do the same? (Barring the fact that souls don’t exist.)
There are certainly conceptions of the soul for which your explanation would be perfect, junk_science. But it is definitely not a Christian explanation, because the Christian concept is profoundly individualistic: each soul is unique and indissoluble. So this *cannot* be what the fundamentalist Christians promoting ensoulment at conception are thinking.
This has always been a huge logical problem for me with the fertilized egg=a life. Until about 14 days, you don’t know whether you’ll get one egg, one fetus; two eggs, a chimera fetus; or one egg that splits to become identical twins, etc. Or a miscarriage, often with the woman never even realizing she’s pregnant, or a failure to implant.
So…you don’t even know how many lives you have for a couple weeks. 0, 1, 2…?
One of my friends is a chimera–she has one green eye and one blue. She’s very proud of being a genetic rareity. (She also has variegated hair, but I don’t know if that’s related.)
mnemosyne, Orthodox Jews only believe that *Jews* shouldn’t eat pork; Jewish dietary law doesn’t apply to non-Jews. Sorry to nitpick, but it’s not a good example.
That can also be mosaic - all the cells have the same DNA, but some have different expression.
My younger son had one brown and one blue eye for about six months. The blue one eventually turned brown, but the time lag was highly suggestive of differential expression of eye color genes.
Thanks, Rob, that does explain it better. Though now re-reading that article, it says that right there.
This is fascinating. Am alternately weirded the hell out and grinning widely. I had never thought about what the genetics behind someone having eyes of a different colour were, either. Neato!
Interestingly, my mother (who is much more conservative than me on sex & contraceptive issues) seemed a bit agitated and disturbed when I brought up the issue today. Huh. She seemed to leap right to the idea that if people knew about genetic abnormalities/unusualnessess while the embryo was in the womb, they would abort it (something she is strongly against), but seemed weirded out by the whole topic even before we got to discussing genetic variations than cause their bearers actual disabilities. Maybe it just bothered her to have her neat boxes of what humans look like messed with–which I admit I feel a little bit, too, though at the moment I’m choosing to go with the “oh wow, wow” reaction.
Hmm.
“If I believed in souls, I would suggest that one soul splits into two and that the two souls can rejoin like beads of water. If a cell can split into two and make two cells just like itself, why couldn’t a soul do the same?”
Junk, may I be the first to say: HERETIC! STONE HER!!!…
:)
mnemosyne, Orthodox Jews only believe that *Jews* shouldn’t eat pork; Jewish dietary law doesn’t apply to non-Jews. Sorry to nitpick, but it’s not a good example.
Uh, yeah, that was kind of my point: that people from other religions (like Judaism) don’t insist on forcing the entire population to conform to their religious beliefs. but somehow it’s perfectly okay for a small minority of Christians to force their beliefs on the rest of us.
Mike, you godbags are just jealous you didn’t think of it first. Look at you guys saying you knew the world was round all along. Don’t worry, I’ll let you pretend you formulated the water-bead-soul theory with me.