| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Thurisaz, Germanic barbarian" |
| Date: |
21 Nov 2007 10:39:53 PM |
| Object: |
Morontheists' copout regarding hermaphrodites? |
Heya my atheist hosts,
it just occurs to me that I think I rarely (if ever indeed!) heard any
morontheist statement regarding homosexuality referring to those among us
humans whose gender identity is somewhat... questionable.
Case in point: I know one woman, beautiful and hot (if somewhat over-slim -
one _could_ mistake her for an anorexic until one has seen how much she
eats each day :) ), being with a standard run-off-the-mill human male, they
are damn happy together...
....yet she's got XY chromosomes (doc only found that out rather recently).
(And some years ago I got to know one case of the opposite - a male with XX
chromosomes - but let's stay with the above case)
So, what do morontheists say about cases like this one? Are these two
people, in their narrow minds, homosexual? If so, do they dare to claim
that she "chose" her male chromosomes? Do they claim, as True Christian
Bigots(TM), that this couple is "living in Sin(TM)"? Do they claim that
there's any way of "reparative therapy" available for this
male-turned-female-for-all-practical-purposes? Et cetera, et cetera, ad
nauseam.
I guess there aren't many options for the world's morontheists really...
1. denial. "Such cases don't exist, it's all a lie from saaataaan, and
genetics is baloney anyway!!1111!!!"
2. ummm... errr... no idea here.
Methinks they really have only one choice, no?
Has any morontheist ever dared to deal with this bizarre topic? If so, with
what results (in other words, _how_ did it make a fool of itself)?
--
"To his friend a man a friend shall prove, and gifts with gifts requite;
But men shall mocking with mockery answer, and fraud with falsehood meet."
(The Poetic Edda)
Must have been written with fundies in mind...
My personal judgment of monotheism:
http://www.carcosa.de/nojebus
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| User: "Michael Gray" |
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| Title: Re: Morontheists' copout regarding hermaphrodites? |
22 Nov 2007 02:14:51 AM |
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On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 05:39:53 +0100, "Thurisaz, Germanic barbarian"
<MAILTOsecretary@carcosa.de> wrote:
Heya my atheist hosts,
it just occurs to me that I think I rarely (if ever indeed!) heard any
morontheist statement regarding homosexuality referring to those among us
humans whose gender identity is somewhat... questionable.
Case in point: I know one woman, beautiful and hot (if somewhat over-slim -
one _could_ mistake her for an anorexic until one has seen how much she
eats each day :) ), being with a standard run-off-the-mill human male, they
are damn happy together...
...yet she's got XY chromosomes (doc only found that out rather recently).
Anne Coulter? ;)
(And some years ago I got to know one case of the opposite - a male with XX
chromosomes - but let's stay with the above case)
So, what do morontheists say about cases like this one? Are these two
people, in their narrow minds, homosexual? If so, do they dare to claim
that she "chose" her male chromosomes? Do they claim, as True Christian
Bigots(TM), that this couple is "living in Sin(TM)"? Do they claim that
there's any way of "reparative therapy" available for this
male-turned-female-for-all-practical-purposes? Et cetera, et cetera, ad
nauseam.
I guess there aren't many options for the world's morontheists really...
1. denial. "Such cases don't exist, it's all a lie from saaataaan, and
genetics is baloney anyway!!1111!!!"
2. ummm... errr... no idea here.
Methinks they really have only one choice, no?
Has any morontheist ever dared to deal with this bizarre topic? If so, with
what results (in other words, _how_ did it make a fool of itself)?
.
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| User: "Thurisaz, Germanic barbarian" |
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| Title: Re: Morontheists' copout regarding hermaphrodites? |
22 Nov 2007 11:04:04 AM |
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Michael Gray:
Anne Coulter? ;)
My bad - I should have said "...I know _and like_ her..." :)
--
"To his friend a man a friend shall prove, and gifts with gifts requite;
But men shall mocking with mockery answer, and fraud with falsehood meet."
(The Poetic Edda)
Must have been written with fundies in mind...
My personal judgment of monotheism:
http://www.carcosa.de/nojebus
.
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| User: "Lord Calvert" |
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| Title: Re: Morontheists' copout regarding hermaphrodites? |
21 Nov 2007 11:31:07 PM |
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Thurisaz, Germanic barbarian wrote:
Heya my atheist hosts,
it just occurs to me that I think I rarely (if ever indeed!) heard any
morontheist statement regarding homosexuality referring to those among us
humans whose gender identity is somewhat... questionable.
I'm still waiting for them to tell me what they think about identical
twins (or triplets or more). If life begins at conception as they so
emphatically claim any pretty much any compulsory birth rally they
host, then identical twins are legally and ethically one person and
one can be destroyed without fear of punishment of any sort. When are
the souls of identical twins created by God? At conception? Then there
is only one soul. Where is that soul hosted? How can we tell the
difference?
Rich Goranson
Amherst, NY, USA
aa#MCMXCIX, a-vet#1
EAC Department of Cruel and Unusual Choreography
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| User: "Thurisaz, Germanic barbarian" |
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| Title: Re: Morontheists' copout regarding hermaphrodites? |
22 Nov 2007 11:04:51 AM |
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Hehe, yeah, a good question too.
In other words, one that the morontheists won't try to answer *eg*
--
"To his friend a man a friend shall prove, and gifts with gifts requite;
But men shall mocking with mockery answer, and fraud with falsehood meet."
(The Poetic Edda)
Must have been written with fundies in mind...
My personal judgment of monotheism:
http://www.carcosa.de/nojebus
.
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| User: "Emma Pease" |
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| Title: Re: Morontheists' copout regarding hermaphrodites? |
22 Nov 2007 02:43:56 PM |
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In article <7359e5d8-c0f2-426e-b058-9707e75e076f@e4g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>, Lord Calvert wrote:
Thurisaz, Germanic barbarian wrote:
Heya my atheist hosts,
it just occurs to me that I think I rarely (if ever indeed!) heard any
morontheist statement regarding homosexuality referring to those among us
humans whose gender identity is somewhat... questionable.
I'm still waiting for them to tell me what they think about identical
twins (or triplets or more). If life begins at conception as they so
emphatically claim any pretty much any compulsory birth rally they
host, then identical twins are legally and ethically one person and
one can be destroyed without fear of punishment of any sort. When are
the souls of identical twins created by God? At conception? Then there
is only one soul. Where is that soul hosted? How can we tell the
difference?
And the counterpart, we also know of human tetragametic chimeras. A
tetragametic chimera is someone who has cells that are genetically
different due to two zygotes merging (in other words two eggs were
fertilized, started developing, and then merged to form one
individual). It is rare but not unknown as Karen Keegan and Lydia
Fairchild found out (initial tests showed they weren't the mothers of
their children which was a bit of a shock to them). Note that some
hermaphrodites are chimeras where one zygote was XX and the other
XY[1] though some/many? people who have this combo seem to be normal
males or females. Have fun figuring out gender/sex/number of souls in
such cases.
Emma
[1] http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/del480v1, "These
cases account for about 13% of true^ hermaphrodites (Danon, 1996 Go
)", the paper was about a baby who was an XX/XY chimera but was female
to all outward appearances.
--
\----
|\* | Emma Pease Net Spinster
|_\/ Die Luft der Freiheit weht
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| User: "Thurisaz, Germanic barbarian" |
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| Title: Re: Morontheists' copout regarding hermaphrodites? |
22 Nov 2007 09:27:09 PM |
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Emma Pease:
Note that some
hermaphrodites are chimeras where one zygote was XX and the other
XY[1] though some/many? people who have this combo seem to be normal
males or females.
Now I knew about these chimeras but never thought about the possibility of
different "genetic genders"... weird thought (to me that is), but also
another damn good point indeed :)
--
"To his friend a man a friend shall prove, and gifts with gifts requite;
But men shall mocking with mockery answer, and fraud with falsehood meet."
(The Poetic Edda)
Must have been written with fundies in mind...
My personal judgment of monotheism:
http://www.carcosa.de/nojebus
.
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| User: "Michael Gray" |
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| Title: Re: Morontheists' copout regarding hermaphrodites? |
23 Nov 2007 01:24:52 AM |
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On Fri, 23 Nov 2007 04:27:09 +0100, "Thurisaz, Germanic barbarian"
<MAILTOsecretary@carcosa.de> wrote:
Emma Pease:
Note that some
hermaphrodites are chimeras where one zygote was XX and the other
XY[1] though some/many? people who have this combo seem to be normal
males or females.
Now I knew about these chimeras but never thought about the possibility of
different "genetic genders"... weird thought (to me that is), but also
another damn good point indeed :)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18024215.100-the-stranger-within.html
"The Stranger within
15 November 2003
NewScientist.com news service
Claire Ainsworth
EXPLAIN this. You are a doctor and one of your patients, a 52-year-old
woman, comes to see you, very upset. Tests have revealed something
unbelievable about two of her three grown-up sons. Although she
conceived them naturally with her husband, who is definitely their
father, the tests say she isn't their biological mother. Somehow she
has given birth to somebody else's children.
This isn't a trick question - it's a genuine case that Margot
Kruskall, a doctor at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in
Boston, Massachusetts, was faced with five years ago. The patient, who
we will call Jane, needed a kidney transplant, and so her family
underwent blood tests to see if any of them would make a suitable
donor. When the results came back, Jane was hoping for good news.
Instead she received a hammer blow. The letter told her outright that
two of her three sons could not be hers. What was going on?
It took Kruskall and her team two years to crack the riddle. In the
end they discovered that Jane is a chimera, a mixture of two
individuals - non-identical twin sisters - who fused in the womb and
grew into a single body. Some parts of her are derived from one twin,
others from the other. It seems bizarre that this can happen at all,
but Jane's is not an isolated case. Around 30 similar instances of
chimerism have been reported, and there are probably many more out
there who will never discover their unusual origins.
While cases like Jane's are the extreme, researchers now think that
there's a little bit of chimera in all of us, and what was once seen
as a biological oddity may serve a vital function. We may owe our
lives to being chimeras.
At first, Jane's case had Kruskall completely puzzled. The original
data came from the tests done to "tissue-type" her and her children.
Such tests are based on a set of genes called the HLA complex, which
encode many different immune proteins, including cell surface proteins
that immune cells use to distinguish the body's own tissues from
foreign material. There are hundreds of different versions, or
alleles, of each HLA gene, and because of this, each person's
combination of alleles is almost unique. But because the genes are
clustered close together on chromosome 6, they tend to be inherited
together in a block known as a haplotype. Everyone inherits two HLA
haplotypes, one from each parent.
Transplant doctors know that the closer the match between two people's
HLA haplotypes, the lower the risk of a transplant between them being
rejected. If you need a transplant, the obvious place to look for
people with a similar haplotype is your close family. Your siblings,
for example, have a 1-in-4 chance of matching yours exactly, while
your children will have at least 50 per cent of your HLA genes.
Confronted with Jane's bizarre test results, Kruskall's team's first
line of enquiry was to take another look at Jane's HLA genes and those
of her immediate family. They identified Jane's haplotypes and dubbed
them 1 and 3. They tested Jane's husband too - he had types 5 and 6.
And when they looked at her sons they confirmed that the original
tissue-typing was correct. While all three shared a haplotype with
their father, only one shared one of Jane's. The other two sons had a
haplotype of unknown origin, labelled type 2 (see Diagram).
The obvious interpretation was that Jane was not the biological mother
of two of her sons, yet they were all conceived naturally, so how
could this be? One possibility was that both boys were accidentally
swapped at birth, but the chance of this happening twice to the same
family is very small. Add in the fact that both sons share a haplotype
with their father and it becomes a near impossibility.
Stumped, Kruskall sent her data out to colleagues, asking them if they
could make sense of it. Soon researchers around the world were
scratching their heads in bewilderment. "I did get the most amazing
set of explanations," Kruskall recalls. "No one could quite figure it
out." One suggested that Jane had secretly undergone fertility
treatment using donated eggs. Another speculated that Jane and her
husband had got her sister to conceive children with his sperm, and
then pretended they were hers.
The breakthrough came when Kruskall's team checked the HLA haplotypes
of other members of Jane's family who had been omitted from the
original tests. They discovered that her brother carried the mystery
haplotype 2 - suggesting that the two sons were related to Jane in
some way after all. "That really provided the spur that kept us
going," Kruskall says.
So where did the sons' odd haplotype come from? Since Jane's blood
cells provided no match, the team decided to test DNA from some of her
other tissues, including her thyroid gland, mouth and hair. What they
discovered was astonishing. Some of her tissues carried haplotypes 1
and 3, while others contained 2 and 4 (The New England Journal of
Medicine, vol 346, p 1546). Jane's body was made up of two genetically
distinct types of cells. There was only one conclusion: Jane was a
mixture of two different people.
Kruskall thinks the most likely explanation for this is that Jane's
mother conceived non-identical twin girls, who fused at an early stage
of the pregnancy to form a single embryo. In medical parlance, Jane is
a tetragametic chimera, a person whose body is made up from two
genetically distinct lines of cells derived from a total of four
gametes - eggs and sperm.
This instantly explains why the tissue-typing yielded such paradoxical
results. For some reason, cells from only one twin have come to
dominate in Jane's blood - the tissue used in tissue-typing. In Jane's
other tissues, however, including her ovaries, cells of both types
live amicably alongside each other, hence the apparently impossible
genetics of her three sons. One came from an egg derived from the twin
whose cells dominate Jane's blood, while his two brothers came from
eggs derived from the other twin's cells.
Nobody knows how common tetragametic chimerism is. It often has no
outward signs and those who uncover their chimeric nature do so only
by accident. Nature reported a similar case to Jane's in 1979, when
genetic tests suggested that a woman could not be the mother of any of
her four children. There had been no hint that the woman was chimeric.
Some chimeras do have unusual physical features. For example, one girl
was discovered to be a chimera because her eyes were different
colours, one brown, the other hazel. Others have come to light when
doctors investigated problems with their reproductive systems, and
found that they had structures from both male and female reproductive
organs as a result of having cells of both sexes in their bodies. But
most probably go through life utterly unaware of their unusual
constitution. "They are probably dramatically under-diagnosed,"
Kruskall says, "and also dramatically rare."
Yet this kind of chimerism may still be common enough to cast doubt on
the way we carry out genetic tests of parenthood. Kruskall is
currently helping out with a court case where a woman is suing her
partner, claiming that he is the father of her child. In a bizarre
twist that would nonplus even Jerry Springer, tissue-typing tests
proved he was the father, but ruled her out as the mother. The
situation could be explained by chimerism in the mother, Kruskall
speculates.
But what about a case where the father was a chimera? "You could
imagine that you could rule out a person who is in fact the father,"
she says. This is especially plausible if one cell line always comes
to dominate in the blood, as happened with Jane. Animal studies of
chimerism suggest that this is indeed common.
What's more, the incidence of tetragametic chimerism is set to rise,
Kruskall says, because of modern fertility techniques that increase
the rate of twinning. Drugs used to make a woman ovulate can cause her
to release more than one egg at a time, for example, while many IVF
clinics still transfer more than one embryo into the womb. And the
fact that embryos are in close contact in the lab dish or when
transferred to the womb may encourage them to fuse, according to a
report by a team at the University of Edinburgh, UK. In 1998, they
reported a case of a chimeric IVF baby who resulted from the
accidental fusion of a male embryo and a female embryo (The New
England Journal of Medicine, vol 338, p 166). The child was outwardly
male, but the left hand side of his internal reproductive system had
developed as an ovary and fallopian tube.
Meanwhile, Jane's mystery is solved - and it even has a happy ending.
Because her body contains double the normal number of HLA haplotypes,
it means that she has a much greater chance of finding a suitable
donor kidney.
But the story doesn't end there. There is growing evidence that
chimerism in one form or another may not be so unusual at all. In
fact, some researchers now think that most of us, if not all, are
chimeras of one kind or another. Far from being pure-bred individuals
composed of a single genetic cell line, our bodies are cellular
mongrels, teeming with cells from our mothers, maybe even from
grandparents and siblings. This may seem a little shocking at first.
The thought of playing host to cells from other people may offend your
sense of individuality. But you may have those outsiders to thank for
keeping you healthy.
During pregnancy, the blood of the mother and fetus are kept separate,
but some cells manage to slip through, meaning that you will have
picked up some cells from your mother, and she some from you. In fact,
some 80 to 90 per cent of women carry their children's cells or DNA in
their blood during pregnancy and up to 50 per cent carry them for
decades after giving birth, a condition called microchimerism (New
Scientist, 24 April 1999, p 4). If your mother then had more children,
some of your cells could in principle slip back through into your
younger sibling's body. And twins can end up swapping cells in the
womb, especially if they share a placenta. So a single person can be a
veritable menagerie of different cell types from different
generations. "Women harbour cells from both their mother and their
children," says J. Lee Nelson, an immunologist at the Fred Hutchinson
Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
The fact that fetal cells persist in their mother's bloodstream for
decades has been known since the mid 1990s. But only recently has
anyone investigated how common it is for cells to move the other way -
from mothers into their children. To investigate this, Nelson and her
colleague Natalie Lambert have been searching for maternal cells in
the blood of adult women.
In a forthcoming paper in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism, they
describe how they took blood samples from 32 healthy women and found
that 22 per cent of them were carrying white blood cells from their
mothers. These maternal cells were relatively rare - at most there
were 50 per million blood cells - but Nelson suspects that more
extensive tests of blood and other tissues such as bone marrow would
reveal microchimerism in a far greater percentage of women. And the
same goes for men too. "Our guess would be that it is probably
universal," she says.
This discovery raises some puzzling questions. How come the invading
cells don't simply get wiped out by the immune system? Do the cells
divide inside their new host? And why do mother and child exchange
cells at all - is it just an accident, or does it have a purpose?
In the case of fetal cells crossing to the mother, Nelson says we
don't know whether it serves any specific purpose, but one important
factor could be that these cells encourage the mother's immune system
to tolerate her fetus. After all, pregnancy is rather like hosting a
transplanted organ for nine months, and transplant researchers have
known for some time that microchimerism caused by white blood cells
from the transplant mixing with those of the recipient can encourage
the host to accept the transplant under certain circumstances. And
researchers think the breakdown of this long-term tolerance to fetal
cells may be the cause of some autoimmune diseases in women (New
Scientist, 24 February 2001, p 8). "But what benefit [fetal cells]
might offer long term, no one knows," Nelson says.
As for cells passing from mother to fetus, there are hints that this
may play a vital role in keeping the unborn child healthy. Your
mother's cells don't just hang around passively in your body, Nelson
believes. They might play an active role in repairing your tissues,
especially while you are still in the womb. And she has evidence that
unknown types of maternal cells cross the placenta and then
"transdifferentiate" or transform themselves into different kinds of
cells that then become part of the baby's body.
Anne Stevens, a researcher in Nelson's team made the discovery while
studying the bodies of babies who had died from an autoimmune disease
called neonatal lupus syndrome, which attacks heart muscle. In the
course of testing the heart cells, she found that the babies' hearts
contained muscle cells that could only have come from their mothers.
Nelson say she can't yet be sure exactly how they got there, but
thinks it likely that blood stem cells from the mother made their way
to the heart of the developing fetus and transdifferentiated into
heart cells. "It really is amazing," she says. "This is really the
next conceptual leap in the entire field, I think."
The question is, what are these maternal cells doing? Are they the
cause of the autoimmune disease in the children or are they trying to
intervene? One possibility is that the presence of the maternal cells
triggers the baby's immune system to attack the heart.
Mother and child usually tolerate each other, but if this were to
break down, the fetus's immune system would identify the mother's
cells as foreign and attack them, with the fetus's own heart cells
getting caught in the crossfire.
But Nelson thinks there is another, more positive explanation. "The
second possibility is that the maternal cells are there trying to
repair the damaged tissue," she says. Her results don't yet tell her
which explanation is correct, but she says: "I always go back to
remembering that there could well be beneficial functions because
[microchimerism] is so common in healthy people."
While microchimerism may force immunologists to rewrite their
textbooks, it may also prod us into seeing ourselves in a new light.
Rather than being isolated individuals, perhaps we should see
ourselves more as a collective - an individual made of many other
different individuals. On one level, you are you, a person with your
own thoughts and feelings. But zoom in one level and you are a
supercolony of individual cells, some cooperating, others competing.
Zoom in to the level of your genome, and you find individual
chromosomes and genes, all jostling to get through to the next round
of natural selection. It's all a question of perspective."
From issue 2421 of New Scientist magazine, 15 November 2003, page 34
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| User: "Michael Ejercito" |
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| Title: Re: Morontheists' copout regarding hermaphrodites? |
28 Nov 2007 11:34:29 PM |
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On Nov 22, 12:43 pm, Emma Pease <e...@kanpai.stanford.edu> wrote:
In article <7359e5d8-c0f2-426e-b058-9707e75e0...@e4g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>, Lord Calvert wrote:
Thurisaz, Germanic barbarian wrote:
Heya my atheist hosts,
it just occurs to me that I think I rarely (if ever indeed!) heard any
morontheist statement regarding homosexuality referring to those among us
humans whose gender identity is somewhat... questionable.
I'm still waiting for them to tell me what they think about identical
twins (or triplets or more). If life begins at conception as they so
emphatically claim any pretty much any compulsory birth rally they
host, then identical twins are legally and ethically one person and
one can be destroyed without fear of punishment of any sort. When are
the souls of identical twins created by God? At conception? Then there
is only one soul. Where is that soul hosted? How can we tell the
difference?
And the counterpart, we also know of human tetragametic chimeras. A
tetragametic chimera is someone who has cells that are genetically
different due to two zygotes merging (in other words two eggs were
fertilized, started developing, and then merged to form one
individual). It is rare but not unknown as Karen Keegan and Lydia
Fairchild found out (initial tests showed they weren't the mothers of
their children which was a bit of a shock to them). Note that some
hermaphrodites are chimeras where one zygote was XX and the other
XY[1] though some/many? people who have this combo seem to be normal
males or females. Have fun figuring out gender/sex/number of souls in
such cases.
Was Lydia Fairchild's marriage valid? Since we know that Lydia
Fairchild are two people in one body, and that American law prohibits
polygamy...
Michael
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