I’m pleased we agree on the science, and I’m pleased we agree that what Bill Nye said was false.

You and I have a significant disagreement, however, about ethics. I agree with the consensus of our civilization that human beings have a right not to be killed unjustly. Anyone who deliberately kills an innocent human being is guilty of murder; any nation which does the same (or permits the same) is guilty of genocide. You make it clear that you do not share this belief, and, indeed, that you would do whatever is necessary to “cull the human herd.”

This is an idea that is worth debating; however, I don’t think the comments of a post about science are the right place to have that debate. With old-school lebensunwertes leben eugenics coming back into vogue on both the Left (which favors reducing certain groups of people for environmental reasons and “compassion”) and on the Right (which favors reducing certain groups of people for racial and economic reasons), I should probably write a post about it, and I’d be happy to hear your thoughts and engage with them then.

For now, I am content that we agree on the scientific issue.

(N.B.: A sperm is not a human being and can be killed freely. Ova are also not human beings and can be killed freely.)

So humanity needs to be put in check humanely. Abortion of a first trimester fetus is more ethical than abortion of a 2nd trimester fetus which is more ethical than bringing an unwanted and unsupported child into the world which is more ethical than harvesting such children to feed the military which is more ethical than police shooting them summarily in the street which is more ethical than Nazi death camps.

My preferred method of culling the human herd is to simply provide women with education and abortion rights and grant them free will. Studies show that educated women have many less children than oppressed women.

This blog post restricted itself to logic and evidentiary facts that are scientific.

This blog post clearly stated that “there are some fairly respectable, sophisticated ethical arguments in support of abortion rights.” But, this blog post made clear, all respectable arguments for abortion are based on metaphysics, not science, and can only be made authoritatively by philosophers, not scientists. The point of this blog post is that, scientifically speaking, the zygote is a human being, and that Bill Nye, as a scientist, cannot use science to refute that scientific fact.

The article you posted proves my point: it is a metaphysics paper written by a philosopher. Dr. Burgess has no scientific credentials, and his argument is ontological, not scientific. He cannot dispute the fact that the zygote is, by any scientific standard, a human being, so he attempts to introduce ontological objections. This is fine, serious work — metaphysics and ontology are a lot more than the mere “semantics and opinion” you make them out to be (which is a weird thing for you to say when you’re citing a metaphysician!) — and I take those objections seriously.

However, the validity of the objections goes beyond the scope of this blog post, which is strictly about the science of embryology, not the metaphysics of it.

Incidentally, though, and just because metaphysics interests me, let me call your attention to a few intriguing features of Dr. Burgess’s paper, which you may or may not find attractive.

(1) He himself maintains that metaphysical “personhood” or “ensoulment” occurs with the nascent human life just six weeks after conception, before most abortions occur.

(2) His objection to the full-starter position that personhood occurs at most a few days after conception is based on his assertion that the logical consequences for twinning are, quote, “creepy.” Suffice to say that I do not find this objection compelling, and have held the precise position he calls creepy for quite some years — and, moreover, it’s a position I learned from practicing philosophers at my university, so it’s not like it’s some outlier view.

(3) His objection to the full-starter conceptionist position that all zygotes and all humans have rights and all this metaphysical debate about personhood is a bald cover for brutal oppression is based on what I consider a rather facile interpretation of conceptionists’ understanding of placentae.

(I could be misreading him — this is a good metaphysics paper, honestly, and I respect it — but it seems to me that, on Page 65, he commits an error when he states that, on the conceptionist view, A = B. No: on the conceptionist view, it seems to me, B is part of A, C is part of A, and A is a human being, at least at this time [which we may call time t1]. At some future time [t2, which I need not identify precisely here], B will still be part of A, and it is even possible that A = B at t2, but C will no longer be part of A. As an example, I was born with baby teeth — they were part of me — but they are no longer part of me — they fell out and the tooth fairy paid me for them. This is a very brief sketch of a reply, and, should Dr. Burgess happen by, I’d be happy to give it some further thought, particularly if I’ve overlooked or misstated some component of his argument.)

That being said in weighing the competing opinions Bill Nye seems to be more correct on this one. The logic and evidentiary facts in the linked paper below are superior to those in this blog post.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19076123