Fact 13: Such claims are all pure mental
speculation, the product of imposing philosophical (or theological) concepts on the
scientific data, and have no scientific evidence to back them up. As the well-known
neurological researcher D. Gareth Jones has succinctly put it, the parallelism between
"brain death" and "brain birth" is scientifically invalid.
"Brain death" is the gradual or rapid cessation of the functions of a brain.
"Brain birth" is the very gradual acquisition of the functions of a developing
neural system. This developing neural system is not a brain. He questions, in fact, the
entire assumption and asks what neurological reasons there might be for concluding that an
incapacity for consciousness becomes a capacity for consciousness once this point is
passed. Jones continues that the alleged symmetry is not as strong as is sometimes
assumed, and that it has yet to be provided with a firm biological base.41 Fact 13: Such claims are all pure mental
speculation, the product of imposing philosophical (or theological) concepts on the
scientific data, and have no scientific evidence to back them up. As the well-known
neurological researcher D. Gareth Jones has succinctly put it, the parallelism between
"brain death" and "brain birth" is scientifically invalid.
"Brain death" is the gradual or rapid cessation of the functions of a brain.
"Brain birth" is the very gradual acquisition of the functions of a developing
neural system. This developing neural system is not a brain. He questions, in fact, the
entire assumption and asks what neurological reasons there might be for concluding that an
incapacity for consciousness becomes a capacity for consciousness once this point is
passed. Jones continues that the alleged symmetry is not as strong as is sometimes
assumed, and that it has yet to be provided with a firm biological base.41 Fact 13: Such claims are all pure mental
speculation, the product of imposing philosophical (or theological) concepts on the
scientific data, and have no scientific evidence to back them up. As the well-known
neurological researcher D. Gareth Jones has succinctly put it, the parallelism between
"brain death" and "brain birth" is scientifically invalid.
"Brain death" is the gradual or rapid cessation of the functions of a brain.
"Brain birth" is the very gradual acquisition of the functions of a developing
neural system. This developing neural system is not a brain. He questions, in fact, the
entire assumption and asks what neurological reasons there might be for concluding that an
incapacity for consciousness becomes a capacity for consciousness once this point is
passed. Jones continues that the alleged symmetry is not as strong as is sometimes
assumed, and that it has yet to be provided with a firm biological base.41 Fact 13: Such claims are all pure mental
speculation, the product of imposing philosophical (or theological) concepts on the
scientific data, and have no scientific evidence to back them up. As the well-known
neurological researcher D. Gareth Jones has succinctly put it, the parallelism between
"brain death" and "brain birth" is scientifically invalid.
"Brain death" is the gradual or rapid cessation of the functions of a brain.
"Brain birth" is the very gradual acquisition of the functions of a developing
neural system. This developing neural system is not a brain. He questions, in fact, the
entire assumption and asks what neurological reasons there might be for concluding that an
incapacity for consciousness becomes a capacity for consciousness once this point is
passed. Jones continues that the alleged symmetry is not as strong as is sometimes
assumed, and that it has yet to be provided with a firm biological base.41
Myth 14: "A ‘person’ is defined in terms of
the active exercising of ‘rational attributes’ (e.g., thinking, willing,
choosing, self-consciousness, relating to the world around one, etc.), and/or the active
exercising of ‘sentience’ (e.g., the feeling of pain and pleasure)."
Fact 14: Again, these are philosophical terms or
concepts, which have been illegitimately imposed on the scientific data. The scientific
fact is that the brain, which is supposed to be the physiological support for both
"rational attributes" and "sentience," is not actually
completely developed until young adulthood. Quoting Moore: Fact 14: Again, these are philosophical terms or
concepts, which have been illegitimately imposed on the scientific data. The scientific
fact is that the brain, which is supposed to be the physiological support for both
"rational attributes" and "sentience," is not actually
completely developed until young adulthood. Quoting Moore: Fact 14: Again, these are philosophical terms or
concepts, which have been illegitimately imposed on the scientific data. The scientific
fact is that the brain, which is supposed to be the physiological support for both
"rational attributes" and "sentience," is not actually
completely developed until young adulthood. Quoting Moore: Fact 14: Again, these are philosophical terms or
concepts, which have been illegitimately imposed on the scientific data. The scientific
fact is that the brain, which is supposed to be the physiological support for both
"rational attributes" and "sentience," is not actually
completely developed until young adulthood. Quoting Moore:
"Although it is customary to divide human development into
prenatal (before birth) and postnatal (after birth) periods, birth is merely a dramatic
event during development resulting in a change in environment. Development does not
stop at birth. Important changes, in addition to growth, occur after birth (e.g.,
development of teeth and female breasts). The brain triples in weight between birth and 16
years; most developmental changes are completed by the age of 25."42
(Emphasis added.)
One should also consider simply the logical—and very
real—consequences if a "person" is defined only in terms of the actual
exercising of "rational attributes" or of "sentience." What would this
mean for the following list of adult human beings with diminished "rational
attributes": e.g., the mentally ill, the mentally retarded, the depressed elderly,
Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients, drug addicts, alcoholics—and for
those with diminished "sentience," e.g., the comatose, patients in a
"vegetative state," paraplegics, and other paralyzed and disabled patients,
diabetics or other patients with nerve or brain damage, etc.? Would they then be
considered as only human beings but not also as human persons? Would that mean that they
would not have the same ethical and legal rights and protections as those adult human
beings who are considered as persons? Is there really such a "split" between a
human being and a human person?
In fact, this is the position of bioethics writers such as the
Australian animal rights philosopher Peter Singer,43 the recently appointed
Director of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Singer argues that the
higher primates, e.g., dogs, pigs, apes, monkeys, are persons—but that some
human beings, e.g., even normal human infants, and disabled human adults, are not
persons. Fellow bioethicist Norman Fost actually considers "cognitively
impaired" adult human beings as "brain dead." Philosopher/bioethicist
R.G.
Frey has also published that many of the adult human beings on the above list are not
"persons," and suggests that they be substituted for the higher primates who are
"persons" in purely destructive experimental research.44 The list
goes on.
IV. Conclusions
Ideas do have concrete consequences—not only in one’s
personal life, but also in the formulation of public policies. And once a definition is
accepted in one public policy, the logical extensions of it can then be applied,
invalidly, in many other policies, even if they are not dealing with the same exact
issue—as happens frequently in bioethics. Thus, the definitions of "human
being" and of "person" that have been concretized in the abortion debates
have been transferred to several other areas, e.g., human embryo research, cloning, stem
cell research, the formation of chimeras, the use of abortifacients—even to the
issues of brain death, brain birth, organ transplantation, the removal of food and
hydration, and research with the mentally ill or the disabled. But both private choices
and public policies should incorporate sound and accurate science whenever possible. What
I have tried to indicate is that in these current discussions, individual choices and
public policies have been based on "scientific" myth, rather than on objective
scientific facts.
Notes
1. B. Lewin, Genes III (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1983),
pp. 9-13; A. Emery, Elements of Medical Genetics (New York: Churchill
Livingstone,
1983), pp. 19, 93.
2. William J. Larsen, Human Embryology (New York: Churchill
Livingstone, 1997), pp. 4, 8, 11.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Müller, Human Embryology &
Teratology (New York: Wiley-Liss, 1994). See also, Bruce M. Carlson, Human
Embryology and Developmental Biology (St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1994), and Keith L. Moore
and T.V.N. Persaud, The Developing Human (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company,
1998).
6. O’Rahilly and Müller 1994, pp. 13-14.
7. Ibid., p. 16. See also, Larsen, op. cit., pp. 3-11;
Moore and Persaud, op. cit., pp. 18-34; Carlson, op. cit., pp. 3-21.
8. Note: The number of chromosomes in the definitive oocyte are
not halved unless and until it is penetrated by a sperm, which really does not take place before
fertilization but is in fact concurrent with and the beginning of the process of
fertilization. However, for simplicity’s sake, many writers (myself among them) will
sometimes assume the reader clearly understands this timing, and simply say, "before
fertilization the sperm and the oocyte each contain 23 chromosomes."
9. O’Rahilly and Müller, p. 19.
10. Moore and Persaud, p. 2.
11. E.g., as determined in extensive numbers of transgenic mice
experiments as in Kollias et al., "The human beta-globulin gene contains a
downstream developmental specific enhancer," Nucleic Acids Research 15(14)
(July, 1987), 5739-47; also similar work by, e.g., R.K. Humphries, A.
Schnieke.
12. Holtzer et al., "Induction-dependent and
lineage-dependent models for cell-diversification are mutually exclusive," Progress
in Clinical Biological Research 175:3-11 (1985); also similar work by, e.g., F.
Mavilio, C. Hart.
13. Larsen, p. 1; also O’Rahilly and Müller, p. 20.
14. Larsen, p. 19, 33, 49.
15. Carlson, p. 31.
16. Carlson, p. 31.
17. O’Rahilly and Müller, p. 55; Carlson, p. 407.
18. Ethics Advisory Board, 1979, Report and
Conclusions: HEW Support of Research Involving Human In Vitro Fertilization and Embryo
Transfer, Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare,
p. 101.
19. Clifford Grobstein, "External human fertilization," Scientific
American 240:57-67.
20. Clifford Grobstein, Science and the Unborn: Choosing Human
Futures (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1988).
21. Dame Mary Warnock, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human
Fertilization and Embryology (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1984), pp.
27, 63. See also the writings of, e.g., H. Tristram Engelhardt, John Robertson (in legal
writings), R.M. Hare, Bedate and Cefalo, William Wallace.
22. Peter Singer, Helga Kuhse, Stephen Buckle, Karen Dawson, and Pascal
Kasimba, Embryo Experimentation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
23. National Institutes of Health: Report of the Human Embryo
Research Panel, September 27, 1994 (National Institutes of Health, Division of Science
Policy Analysis and Development, Bethesda, MD).
24. Clifford Grobstein, "The early development of human
embryos," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 1985:10:213-236; and Richard
McCormick, "Who or what is the preembryo?" Kennedy Institute of Ethics
Journal 1991:1:1-15.
25. Richard McCormick, ibid., p. 3.
26. McCormick, ibid., p. 3.
27. Larsen, p. 19, 33.
28. Moore and Persaud, p. 131.
29. O’Rahilly and Müller, p. 51.
30. McCormick, op. cit., p. 4.
31. O’Rahilly and Müller, p. 32.
32. Karen Dawson, "Segmentation and moral status," in Peter
Singer et al., Embryo Experimentation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), p. 58. See also Moore and Persaud, p. 133.
33. For extensive comments on the make-up of the NIH Human Embryo
Research Panel and on its Report, see several of my articles in my book, co-authored with
human embryologist C. Ward Kischer, The Human Development Hoax: Time to Tell The Truth!
(Clinton Township, MI: Gold Leaf Press, 1995) (1st ed.); (2nd. ed. published by authors
1997; distributed by the American Life League, Stafford, VA).
34. O’Rahilly and Müller, p. 55.
35. Carlson, p. 3.
36. Moore and Persaud, p. 58.
37. But see Albert Moraczewski, "Managing tubal pregnancies: Part
I" (June 1996) and "Part II" (August 1996), in Ethics and Medics
(Braintree, MA: Pope John Center).
38. O’Rahilly and Müller, p. 8-9.
39. The use of massive historically incorrect and theoretically
indefensible philosophy in the "delayed personhood" arguments has been addressed
in my doctoral dissertation, A Philosophical and Scientific Analysis of the Nature of
the Early Human Embryo (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University, Department of
Philosophy, 1991); see also several of my previously published articles in my book,
co-authored by C. Ward Kischer, supra, note 33, The Human Development Hoax: Time
To Tell The Truth!, which gives extensive references pro and con these bioethics
arguments.
40. For an excellent and easy to read analysis of the problem of a
mind/body split as one of the fundamental theoretical problems in contemporary bioethics
theory, see Gilbert C. Meilaender, Body, Soul, and Bioethics (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); see also many of the excellent articles about this
problem in bioethics theory in Raanan Gillon (ed.), Principles of Health Care Ethics
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994); also Edwin R. DuBose, Ronald P. Hamel and
Laurence J. O’Connell (eds.), A Matter of Principles? Ferment in U.S. Bioethics
(Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994)—especially the
"Preface" by Albert Jonsen. Even Daniel Callahan has admitted that the bioethics
principles don’t work, in "Bioethics: Private choice and common good," in The
Hastings Center Report (May/June 1994), pp. 28-31.
41. D. Gareth Jones, "Brain birth and personal identity," Journal
of Medical Ethics 15:4, 1989, p. 178.
42. Moore and Persaud, p. 2; see also Jones, p. 177.
43. Peter Singer, "Taking life: Abortion," in Practical
Ethics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 118; Helga Kuhse and Peter
Singer, "For sometimes letting—and helping—die," Law, Medicine and
Health Care, 1986, 3:4:149-153; Kuhse and Singer, Should the Baby Live? The Problem
of Handicapped Infants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 138; Singer and
Kuhse, "The ethics of embryo research," Law, Medicine and Health Care,
1987, 14:13-14; Michael Tooley, "Abortion and infanticide," in Marshall Cohen
(ed.) et al., The Rights and Wrongs of Abortions, (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1974), pp. 59, 64; H. Tristram Engelhardt, The Foundations of
Bioethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 111.
44. R.G. Frey, "The ethics of the search for benefits: Animal
experimentation in medicine," in Raanan Gillon (ed.), Principles of Health Care
Ethics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994), pp. 1067-1075. |
