This is interesting to me at the margins, because one of the things I learned when my wife got pregnant the first time was that the womb is not exactly the warm cradle of nurturing that I had always (without thinking much about it) imagined, but in many ways a blast door or containment vessel to protect the mother (host) from the fetus (roughly, xenomorph) that would otherwise explode like an aggressive parasite (killing them both).
So I mean, you probably don't want to have any leaks or weak stitches in your uterus transplant...
> Results also suggested lower prevalence (p = 0.03) and concentration (p = 0.06) of male microchimerism in the brains of women with Alzheimer’s disease than the brains of women without neurologic disease.
> It’s no accident that many of the same genes active in embryonic development have been implicated in cancer. Pregnancy is a lot more like war than we might care to admit.
Amazing article. Another reason that hardshelled laid eggs are such a great invention. The offspring can do its thing from a safe distance.
Birds, the inheritors of the venerable Dinosaur brand, managed to both produce very large eggs (e.g. ostriches), and impressively capable brains, rivaling those of larger mammalians (e.g. parrots, corvids), interestingly, without the use of very large eggs.
We overfocus on brain volume, when we should be calculating the number of neurons and neuron size varies wildly.
I can't find the original video, but Suzana Herculano-Houzel developed a technique to measure total neuron counts by liquefying the brain and then counting the cell nucleus density / volume.
(nice short popsci intro) The woman who turns brains into soup: Suzana Herculano-Houzel
https://youtu.be/d2Uhv0_Ji1k?t=362 (talks about racoon and bird brains)
It's something to marvel at, really. Birds _needed_ to evolve super efficient brains due to all the constraints that flight puts on the organism; they have to be more efficient by weight as well as by size. Meanwhile, being earthbound like you or I lets our DNA get away with a lot more slop.
Not doing taxes is a plus for corvids in my book. Seriously, you picked one of the least impressive human activities. Makes me think about my potential reincarnation choices.
Crows fly, mate for life and are considered positive for the ecosystem. Humans do taxes.
Are you sure? I would be very surprised if a human could build a nest that a crow would accept unaltered.
Most birds’ nests are built much more intricately than just a pile of sticks thrown together! Usually built from layers of different materials, sometimes weaved or plastered with mud/clay/bird-spit.
E.g. sparrows pick up lavender in my garden, because the oils repel some pests etc.
There are many articles about bird intelligence available from multiple sources.
A more open minded perspective would instead try to look to what is "remotely close" to a human brain.
Although primates can't quite communicate like humans, they are known for being our closest relatives in scientific biological terms.
I know I am deviating from the birds subject a little, but stick with me. I need to address the "remotely close" expression you used.
Primates can display what humans would recognize as human behavior. Work in groups, social dynamics, use of simple tools.
The "looks like human" effect could be explained by anthropomorphization performed by those very humans (to put it simply: an effect where humans see human features in non human things). In fact, some behaviors considered as human are not commonly displayed by primates, like the ability to keep a pet. There is no clear definitive answer to it, and any dismissal of such behaviors could be also used to dismiss humans themselves, therefore I must refrain from entertaining them too much.
Birds also show a lot of human like behavior. Like the ability to gather objects (to construct a nest and to attract a partner are common examples).
Remember, the closest thing to humans in anatomy and biology (primates) is not very much different from birds in terms of "how it presents human-like" behavior.
So, as a counter argument, I would ask: what makes the difference of thinking between a primate and a bird so different to you? Is it their anatomy that prevents you from anthropomorphizing it so readily? Or do you also think primate brains are "nothing remotely close to a human brain"?
It cannot be denied that "closeness" is a loose definition and could generate endless discussion. I tried to concede a little bit to find a reasonable common ground that is both based on rational thinking and a little bit of open mindedness.
Under such criteria, I can assert that birds might be much more intelligent than previously assumed.
Thoughtful (and thought-provoking) comments like yours are why I frequent this site.
Thank you, stranger!
For my part, I'll add that "Humans are visual creatures", which biases every aspect of our culture -- and might help explain why many would consider other primates "closer" to us than birds.
Thanks for your answer. Let me elaborate a little bit. What diffentiates humans from most animals is not about solving complex puzzles (some birds are able to do that) or be able to learn things (birds and primates can do that as well) but in the ability of humans to plan for the future. As far as I know (but do correct me if you have better information) there is no animal that exhibits:
1) the ability to plan ahead of time
2) in a non innate way
The consequence is that humans actually build stuff by investing time and energy by visualizing a future benefit without immediate gratification. I believe this is unique in the realm of animals, at least for now.
Primates do display acquired learning. Like the knowledge to hunt ants with sticks. A non innate ability that requires planning and is passed along to members of the same social group.
It has been reported that some eagles and hawks spread fire to drive out prey from dense vegetation. Whether that is learned behavior and planning for the future, a previously undiscovered innate behavior, or just a myth, depends on results of further research.
Whales wearing salmon hats is a story that, if happens to be true, would also be a non-innate behavior, whose purpose we don't know, that could point to something close to what you described.
Humans are different, I cannot disagree.
My play was to challenge our assumptions of what that perceived distance from humans to animals is consisted of.
We can come up with increasingly more convoluted ways of defining what we are. Animals can't. Maybe that is our innate ability.
My uncle said yesterday that man's harsh nature goes back to Rome: Homo homini lupus.
The article says it goes back a lot further than Rome!
> So if it’s a fight, what started it? The original bone of contention is this: you and your nearest relatives are not genetically identical. In the nature of things, this means that you are in competition. And because you live in the same environment, your closest relations are actually your most immediate rivals.
In all non-human species selfless cooperation falls off a cliff beyond siblings, and AFAIU this comports well with Game Theory-type models for understanding genetics. Popular examples of non-human cooperation, naked mole rates and bonobos, actually live in communities dominated by sisters. (It's not often noted, though, in the breathless narratives extolling the virtues of cooperation and anthropomorphizing the rest of the animal kingdom.)
Human behavior, however, is still a deep, deep mystery in terms of evolutionary biology. I'm always wary of people applying evolutionary principles to human behaviors. Writ large you can see contours of what we would expect to see, but even then it's unclear why the boundaries are where they are, or to what degree we're projecting expectations into the data, etc. The speculation quotient is extreme. I wouldn't put any stock into evolutionary biology-based explanations for human behavior. And just as a practical matter, it's not like most people would leave their most hated cousin to die in a ditch; and though most people wouldn't leave anyone to die in a ditch--at least, if they knew that's what they were doing--I'm betting they're more likely to save a cousin than a stranger.
my viewpoint is that the human ability to cooperate effectively is why there's currently 8+ billion of us on earth and chimpanzees are an endangered species.
Our capacity for stories and language helps us create large cooperation networks, which is a unique evolutionary advantage.
Chimps have cooperation limited to "we are genetically close and you give me banana so I give you banana".
Humans can create something like the Roman Republic, or modern nation states and corporations, based on a shared set of stories and language (culture, also includes stuff like rituals, socio-sexual taboos, etc), which enables millions of us to collaborate together towards a common goal. Which is why we're so successful as a species.
Capitalism allows thousands of people who don't know eachother or even speak the same language to work together to make all the components of a pencil.
All of those people might be selfish, yet they still work together without even knowing they are doing so.
Homo homini lupus is the latin for "Man is wolf for man", famous quote from Plautus.
Homini is the declination of Homo, is dative case. I don't know how to properly translate dative to english, something like "to give".
I know this from Philosophy and Latin (separate) in Highschool around the nineties in Spain. They both were compulsory global subjects. I think Latin is not compulsory this days.
Couldn't help myself, being a speaker of a language with grammatical cases, which allows the translation of "homo homini lupus" without changing the grammatical structure. At the same time, some loanwords escape the declination system, giving birth to the joke above.
The quote from Plautus appears to be lupus est homo homini, which is much easier to parse. There's a verb and everything. (I didn't know that; I just looked it up.)
> I don't know how to properly translate dative to english, something like "to give".
Yes, the word literally means "giving [case]", but the grammatical concept in English is generally called "indirect object". English mostly doesn't have cases, so supplemental arguments to verbs tend to be marked by associated prepositions, making them "indirect".
When talking about Latin specifically or languages with noun case in general, it is normal in English to refer to the "dative case"; you don't really need to translate it.
I assume the case was named after the action of giving because giving is a very common action that necessarily involves three things. (Giver, gift, and recipient.) The name tells you what it means by example: "if a gift is given, the dative case is the one you'd use for the recipient".
That depends. Look it up. You will find there is a point where it switches. Normally the body (of both baby and mother) will protect the mother. Something goes wrong or just gets too far "out of spec"? Miscarriage. After a few months, the body goes so far as to sedate the mother and child before terminating the pregnancy. There is research claiming it actually shuts down the baby's nervous system before decoupling.
But about a month before birth things switch around. The womb partially disconnects from control systems of the mother's body and ... there's an extremely scary way of pointing this out I once heard from a medical professor: "you know just about the only thing a human body can still do when it's decapitated? It can give birth"
In less extreme circumstances, you actually have a switch in your circulatory system ... when pregnancy gets to this point and the mother's body loses power, it will initiate a rapid birthing process, and start shutting down organ after organ to give birth with the remaining power. That includes, eventually, the brain. Only the heart, lungs, liver and womb will remain operational. The body will shut down blood flow to the brain to continue giving birth. Once shut down it cannot be turned back on. So this kills the mother, despite the body remaining functional, in some reported cases, for over an hour, and is something gynaecologists get trained to prevent from happening.
Given how common it was even a century ago for women to die giving birth, one wonders how often this mechanism was involved.
No sources provided and internet failed to confirm ... closest I found was
> In extremely rare forensic cases, a phenomenon called "coffin birth" (post-mortem fetal extrusion) can occur, where gases from decomposition expel a fetus from the deceased mother's body. This is not true childbirth and is extremely rare, occurring only under specific post-mortem conditions.
Oh come on, any medical text will confirm that the womb has it's own nervous system and blood supply and a good text will tell you that the system will function correctly in even completely paralyzed women. Just how do you think that works? And any text will SCREAM at you to keep a constant eye on the woman giving birth: if they stop breathing IT WILL NOT stop the birth, rather it will cause severe symptoms afterwards. A gynaecologist is not telling women to breathe to calm them down.
The blood supply and nerves are weird special cases in a great many ways. For instance, they're not left-right symmetric (whereas the ones of "nearby" systems, like the bladder, are. So this was not done because there's only one womb)
>a good text will tell you that the system will function correctly in even completely paralyzed women. Just how do you think that works?
the body has a lot of messaging systems; 'completely paralyzed' people still enjoy the use of many chemical messaging signals; they just generally have a hindered spinal cord or neurological interface element.
A paralyzed person will still go into shock after a dismemberment, blood-flow will be affected by vaso-constriction, and so on. It doesn't surprise me to hear that childbirth can trigger a similar set of conditions to occur.
And that belittles the existence of the underlying support nervous system and the secondary elements. Many completely paralyzed men can achieve erection and ejaculation even with a near total disconnect from the rest of the nervous system. Why? The parasympathetic nervous system and secondary nervous materials in the region in question are taking up the slack from the brain and still allowing 'normal' function.
But some form of evolution might make it a local optimum. It would at least require 3 or more offspring per pregnancy, and could not happen in mammals, though.
If that was true when you were an infant, you're part of an extreme minority.
You would not have survived more than a few weeks past birth in the absence of modern medical interventions — well, that part at least was true for most of us — but specifically an inability to process milk as an infant is very rare, precisely because "mammary" is what puts the "mam" in "mammal".
I get downvoted every time I feel like posting this (the thread is markedly appropriate), so I'll give some background this time. I'll get to the point after a little bit of setup.
To segue from your post, I was adopted as an only child at birth, so formula was the only option. No IgA exposure, which probably over-taxed my early immune system.
But in being adopted, I have very nontraditional feelings about cloning, artificial birth, etc. I knew about my adoption from an early age, so it deeply worked itself into my thinking. At about elementary school age, some of my asshole neighbors bullied and called me a bastard, but that didn't really impact me as much as the feeling of being a genetic island completely alien to everyone else. All of my peers were related to their birthing parents and sometimes clonal siblings, yet I was alone in the universe. My weird hobbies and behaviors and preferences were out of the norm for my family. Despite my closeness with them, I didn't feel the same as everyone else around me. I wasn't. I was a nerd, absorbed into science books and Bill Nye. The southern culture and football and Christian God I grew up around wasn't my home, and I couldn't understand it just as others couldn't understand me. Everyone talks about blood as being a big deal - it's even in the foundation of the religion I was raised in - but to me, it meant nothing. It really shaped how I feel about humanity and biology and families and reproduction and the universe. Ideas, not nucleotides, are the information that matters.
I've understated and undersold how fundamentally differently this makes me feel about people.
Because of my perspective, I have controversial viewpoints about human biology. I don't find them weird at all, but there's a good chance it'll offend you:
If we can ever get over the societal (religious?) ick factor, perhaps we could one day clone MHC-negative, O-negative, etc. monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs. Use genetic engineering to de-encephalize the brain, and artificially innervate the spine and musculature. We'd have a perfect platform for every kind of organ and tissue transplant, large scale controlled in situ studies, human knockouts, and potentially crazy things like whole head transplants to effectively cure all cancers and aging diseases except brain cancers and neurodegeneration.
Because they're clones engineered to not expose antigens, their tissues could be transplanted into us just like plants being grafted. No immunosuppressants. This might become the default way to cure diseases in the future. We could even engineer bodies that increase our physiological capacity. Increased endurance, VO2 max, younger age, different sex, skin color, transgenic features. Alien hair colors. You name it.
I bring things like this up and get ostracized and criticized. But it feels completely normal to me. Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.
In light of how others think, I don't think I'd have these thoughts so comfortably if I didn't feel like something of a clone already. A genetic reject, an extraterrestrial growing up, tends to think differently.
Flipping this around, your aversion to this is because you have a mother and father that birthed you that you share blood with. That you grew up in a god fearing society bathed in his sacrificial blood. If you were like me, perhaps you'd think like me.
I'm totally perplexed that other people find this disgusting or horrifying. It feels wholly natural.
On a general note, if this feels natural and right to you, don't be quick to dismiss others' views as having less substance or credibility and being conditioned. But I appreciate that you earnestly believe this, and for that there is nothing prima facie wrong with your view either.
> Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.
I feel like this is not obvious. Many people seem to want to enjoy life more than anything else, and if this biotech means curing cancer so they can do so for longer, sure, but at some point it may be too invasive. Like if you have to undergo a procedure every year to get diminishing returns. A lot of the features you mention are nice to have, but not strongly appealing to me personally. Particularly for something like immortality: if I'm going to have that, I want a lot of other things too that biotech won't obtain.
Also, at that level of biotech, it seems like we could forgo the clones and enhance our bodies directly. That would remove the ethical concerns of cloning, in particular the notion of creating clones for our own purposes instead of letting them reach their own. Beliefs that boil down to "I was here first" or "I beat you" are common, but I find them problematic.
Birth/creation is a fascinating philosophical topic. I have a radical view which isn't quite "life is suffering so being born is a net harm", but I think that life is not all that valuable. I won't go out of my way to harm existing life, but I'm not sure I should go out of my way to accomodate new life. If humans all died off naturally, would that be such a bad thing? Life is great, but it's not that great. If we do gain cloning technology, I think we should afford clones the potential to do as they will, just as we want for ourselves. Again, we could probably obviate clones for the purposes you see.
> I don't find them weird at all, but there's a good chance it'll offend you:
It does not offend me. I cannot say if I would be upset if this were to be turned from idea to reality because the closest thing in reality is quite upsetting; but because I think that the only part of a body capable of suffering is the CNS, I also regard any potential upset on my part about a realisation of your idea as a "me problem", not a "you problem".
That said, I don't know how far we are from being able to perfom what you suggest, even in principle.
It may well be the case that growing a full human without a CNS is harder than solving 3D bioprinting.
One downside of such a degree of biological mastery, is that it does to trust in real life what AI is currently doing to trust online.
Most of the ick factors are because of our empathy, which triggers upon seeing another human being in "icky" states of being and makes us imagine what it would feel like to be in such a state.
I think that in this case, the ick factor is because evolved traits can only work with relatively simple patterns.
My guess is for many of us, our gut says "looks like a human therefore is human"; if you try to tell gut instinct it's fine because there's no brain, you're gut's response is "Brain and brain! What is brain?"
My gut seems to care more about dynamic behaviour than static appearance, but for what it's worth — and despite being able to understand the premise of @echelon's suggestion without being upset by it — even I find images of a real, natural, human birth defect where the brain is missing, to be horrifying (content warning: do not google "anencephaly" unless you're strong stomached).
> Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.
unlike man-made machines, we do not fully understand our bodies yet, and as such should be careful when trying to make them better. Don't start randomly `rf -rf *` on a Unix system if you don't know what it does, don't start randomly using steroids if you aren't sure of the long term biological consequences.
Obviously, your proposed "monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs" would help with that.
If you'll also allow me a quick remark on your upbringing, as someone from an intellectual Parisian family who grew up in God-fearing, football-loving Texas...
I'm sure that somewhere in the South, there is a little gay kid, or one born with an odd mutation, to his birth parents, who felt or feels the exact same way you did - as something of an alien. I believe that the vast majority of cultures will produce outsiders, and it's also very probable that somewhere in Paris, there is someone who doesn't feel at home in the midst of heavy intellectual conversation and would prefer a simpler world focused on traditional religion and football (possibly association football/soccer, rather than American football).
Humans can form 'tribes', in the loosest sense of the word possible, based on genetics, but we also form tribes based on similar beliefs, values and interests - for example, Hacker News :)
> Humans can form 'tribes', in the loosest sense of the word possible, based on genetics, but we also form tribes based on similar beliefs, values and interests - for example, Hacker News :)
I agree with this, and I'm glad we do. But I've posted the "let's harvest clones for organs" idea numerous times on HN -- a community where many of us are on somewhat of a similar wavelength. It's usually met with a lot of vitriol and disgust.
> Obviously, your proposed "monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs" would help with that.
That's one of the nice things about this. It would give us an organismal research platform where we could replicate experiments. No more animal studies, imperfect chimera systems, or molecular experiments we can't scale up. We'd have a perfect test bed for investigating almost everything that ails us.
> Pregnancy is, it seems, just another (evolutionary) war.
I think this is a useful insight even on a higher level. For evolution (if you want to anthropomorphize it), war and conflict are just another set of tools in the toolbox. Where humans see those as evidence of something going wrong and evil to eradicated, for evolution it's "working as intended".
(Or, if you don't want to anthropomorphize it, an indication how much of evolution and biology is just barely tamed chaos)
(Careful to draw conclusions for human society from this though. People in the past had already seen the Darwinian "struggle between the species" as a model for society, which brought "Social Darwinism" and ultimately the Nazi ideology.
A different conclusion would be that biology is in fact not a perfect ideal to aspire to, and even in the situations where it "works", its factual objectives are not always the same as ours. Which does give legitimacy for the endeavor to improve upon it - for everyone)
"And so while the cooperative outcome would be the most efficient, you lead to a situation in which there are conflict costs, and I think this explains why things go wrong so often during pregnancy. Of course, at first sight it's strange, my heart and my liver have been functioning very well for for 62 years, and yet during pregnancy, you have a natural process that only lasts for nine months, and yet many things go wrong during it. And I would argue that the reason why pregnancy doesn't work as smoothly as the normal functioning of the body is that in normal bodily functioning all the parts of the body are genetically identical to each other and working towards survival of that body, but in pregnancy, you have two different genetic individuals interacting with each other and natural selection can act at cross-purposes, there's a sort of politics going on, and we know that politics does not always lead to efficient outcomes."
> So I mean, you probably don't want to have any leaks or weak stitches in your uterus transplant...
With this sort of surgery, they wouldn't be cutting into the uterus (womb) itself when extracting it from the donor, but instead will cut around it to remove it, along with some very essential plumbing. The receiving mum will also be on industrial-strength immune suppressants anyway.
Where you DO have to worry about leaks and weak stitches is with said plumbing (uterine arteries and veins) -- they have to support virtual firehoses of blood through the duration of pregnancy, and their damage is one reason why a delivery can go south very, very quickly. Obstetric medicine is definitely a high-risk sport, which is why their malpractice insurance rates are head and shoulders above any other medical specialty. But I digress...
Pretty sure that’s not some fringe theory. Didn’t the director and visual designers consciously use rape as the model for how to depict the Alien attacks?
Absolutely. From what I understand, there's been an evolutionary war for resources between the womb and the placenta, which is a big part of why human pregnancies are so complicated and invasive compared to other mammals (because no other mammal has this anywhere near as extreme as we do).
I believe it all comes down to our giant noggin/brain. It's a giant resource tar pit, it's why we're born effectively premature, it's why we take forever to be in any shape of form self sufficient and it's why we would drain the mother of all resources available if she wouldn't regulate that desire to fuel our brain to the max.
Turns out, being the most intelligent apex comes with some gestational specialities.
> containment vessel to protect the mother (host) from the fetus (roughly, xenomorph) that would otherwise explode like an aggressive parasite (killing them both).
You can also flip the perspective the fetus is trying to survive in a hostile environment designed to strangle it. If it isn't clawing for every ounce of food and air it will become a miscarriage. It must interface with a system built for millenia designed to kill anything that doesn't have its code.
In truth, it is the equilibrium that evolution has achieved. Placenta must account for the most vicious fetus, and fetus must account for most vicious placenta.
Did you read the article? It's not. It's somewhat fighting against it. Plus immune system would see baby's DNA as corrupted, since half of it is just wrong.
They also check the blood type of the baby and the mother and I believe this is to make sure the mother won’t throw clots, and to take precautions if there’s a mismatch.
> The first baby born as a result of a womb transplant was in Sweden in 2014. Since then around 135 such transplants have been carried out in more than a dozen countries, including the US, China, France, Germany, India and Turkey. Around 65 babies have been born.
"Grace was born with a rare condition, Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, where the womb is missing or underdeveloped, but with functioning ovaries"
I stopped and looked at the natal photo for a while. It is a feeling I have not had before. This new life, chanced not only by lineage but multiple family members and a host of research and medical staff.
The image shows very little technology, but to me, is the epitome of how life and progress can unite.
Because people take what I consider a reasonable statement (“It is immoral to pass on certain genes.”) and conflate it with an evil implementation (“We should enforce this via violence.”) It’s what I call “Germany syndrome”, where past abuses (e.g. nazism) lead to an overreaction (“let’s not elect a remotely right-wing party for decades.”)
This is such a bad-faith reading man, I don’t know why you’re even bothering to respond. You can’t just say “well that’s eugenics” and act like that’s a sufficient reason to dismiss it. If you think it’s okay to eg have kids knowing they’ll have huntingtons or some other nasty way to die, why?
I’m not arguing that the state should forcibly implement this, which is usually the common (and legitimate) argument against this line of thinking.
Right, you're just making the moral case on which other people would build coercion, either formally through public policy interventions or socially. You yourself though are just interested in the ideas.
You can make a case for coercing people to do any good thing or not do any bad. We shouldn't approach this by denying right and wrong but rather by discussing what the state can or cannot do.
Socially is another story which I'd be fine with or even encourage. Saying I'm "just interested in ideas" is a hell of a way to dismiss thinking about what's right and wrong for me personally to do, for others to do. Not all thought has to involve the damn government as the actor.
I am saying precisely what I said: it is wrong to do. Not all that which is legal is moral, nor is all that which is illegal immoral. The state is an enforcer of the social contract and a monopolist of violence, not an arbiter of morality.
I believe people do plenty of immoral things but do not necessarily believe we ought to use that state violence to prevent or punish them. Adultery, for instance, is one of the more contemptible choices one can make, and yet goes unpunished by the state. Some jurisdictions don’t even consider it strongly in divorce proceedings.
This isn't an argument against anything I said. You can't say "some people in the past also said this." That tells nobody anything about whether it's right or wrong.
That's because it's one of the few things that we know, empirically, turned out so wrong, it's one of the wrongest things humanity has ever wronged. Most people don't need to be told that, for this obvious reason.
It sucks that GP’s comment is flagged dead… it’s an opinion a lot of people seem to disagree with but IMO it’s not against the site’s guidelines or anything. It could be an interesting conversation if folks are willing to debate in a curious way.
My personal take is that it’s a moral imperative for humans to eventually edit obviously-bad disorders out of the gene pool going forward, through CRISPR-style editing or just selecting sperm/eggs to exclude the known bad genes. We have to come up with a good definition of “disorder” that people can be happy with, but I don’t think it’s an impossible task to do so.
I think it’s a moral imperative precisely because we’re so good at medical intervention that we’re able to keep people with a variety of conditions and disorders alive and even procreating, when “naturally” they wouldn’t have been able to do so without advanced medicine. Because of this, such disorders become more and more common in the gene pool because they’re no longer being effectively selected against.
We ought to prevent the human race from being utterly dependent on advanced medicine for survival, is my point. And IMO the way to do that, is to make sure that if we’re using advanced medicine to allow people with a genetic disorder to live a healthy life and procreate, we ought to do the gene editing necessary to make sure the disorder itself is not passed on to the next generation. (Basically address the “root cause” as well as the symptoms.)
Interesting, are you stating there is no scenario under which you would consider those types of body modifications not quite acceptable? I am curious about your individual line. You state there isn't one, but I am relatively certain one exists.
It’s Sorites. I don’t have a line because the cost to identify it is much greater than the cost to move forward. When we cross it or approach a positive feedback loop, we will take a step back and re-evaluate.
> Interesting, are you stating there is no scenario under which you would consider those types of body modifications not quite acceptable?
Yes! If some body modifications make someone more efficient at killing, raping, stealing, committing crimes we should all be against it. If it is just because it annoys some people's sense of nature, no.
Once we can control fully developed adult brains, at the level you're suggesting for this thought experiment, that power will force us to reconsider criminality as a mental health issue — even if the personality disorders leading to criminality happen to be harder to fix in adults than boosting of IQ.
But note how I phrased that: Being able to rewrite the DNA of killers etc. to make them smarter, in the absence of influencing developed adult brains, only makes their descendants (in the strictly genetic sense of the word) smarter.
At some point in this century, and probably sooner rather than later, we're going to be able to cost-effectively write arbitrary human-length genomes. Simply printing a custom genome will likely happen well before it becomes possible to safely rewrite live adult genomes, which is itself a different task from understanding, controlling, or safely re-activating in adults, the developmental pathways that lead to healthy growth within a brain for things as vague as "lust", "empathy", or "intelligence".
But to your previous question, "At what point does it get silly?": at some point, we're all made of atoms, and if we had a level of control over matter as in fictional narratives like The Culture or Star Trek, then (modulo weight changes) all your atoms can be rearranged to turn you into a copy of me, or anyone else on the planet, or any other species including fully customised not-found-in-nature varieties.
I'm reminded of a cover of a Monty Python song:
> Oh, I'm a lycanthrope and I'm okay, I romp all night and I sleep all day.
Heh. I do not believe so for one reason and one reason only. It is not exactly secret what it chooses on a rather daily basis. That as a race we have managed to remove ourselves somewhat from the grip of that choice is a testament to our arrogance. In other words, I do not think you are accurate. I know, because I see things in front of me. I am uncertain on how you know what you know.
How is it awful? There is already too many humans on this planet and here we are spending resources on bodies that would obviously not even begin to exist save for technology. If anything, I am likely more reasonable here than the emotional gasps of 'ooh science'. Is it an interesting solved challenge? Sure. Is it something that is going to further remove us from reality.. also yes.
We should have twice as many people on this planet. Add we're going to do it, and we're going to feed them, and they're going to come up with ideas and do things. It's going to be even more awesome than it already is
Naturally. But it won’t matter. The human extinctionists are a self solving problem. I don’t worry that much about them except in making sure we don’t construct individual vetos.
Just for clarity, "in UK" is qualifying the whole thing, not that she just happened to be in the UK. A woman in Alabama had a child via a uterus transplant, among other places.
> He told the BBC around 10 women have embryos in storage or are undergoing fertility treatment, a requirement for being considered for womb transplantation. Each transplant costs around £30,000, he says, and the charity has sufficient funds to do two more.
Is this because they're not connecting the transplanted uterus to the fallopian tubes or something? Or is there some other reason that it wouldn't be possible to conceive the "old-fashioned way" post-transplant?
Creating and freezing embryos otherwise seems like a very strange thing for a woman to have done who has no uterus, unless she was already considering surrogacy. Where was she expecting them to grow?
Requiring the embryos to be created before knowing whether the womb transplant would be possible or successful seems really odd to me.
Wondering the same. Surrogacy would seem like a much safer option. Just use the working womb without transplanting it. Why put two people through major surgery, plus additional risks for the baby?
Lab-grown vaginas made from the patient's own stem-cells have also been transplanted into women [1]. Hopefully soon it will be possible to get the whole #!/usr/bash.
Interesting, I did not know that. Makes me wonder if we're compounding infertility issues into the future if this is done at scale. Not saying that's right or wrong, but it's worth thinking about.
Right, exactly, that's my point. We're building in a dependency for future fertility on these advanced techniques (again, assuming the scaling theory is true).
I can't help but wonder if there is any hope of this working for trans persons in the future?
Could someone born as a man have a transplanted womb and get pregnant through in-vitro fertilization, in theory? anyone here with more medical knowledge who can comment on how likely that is to work at some point in the future?
Considering how many trans people who are assigned female at birth get hysterectomies (tissue that would otherwise be discarded), maybe there could be a "give a uterus, take a uterus" matching program...
Maybe I'm missing the point you're trying to make but people who get hysterectomies aren't doing it for fun, they're doing it because the organ is diseased so giving it to someone else wouldn't work.
Among those "trans people who are assigned female at birth" who "get hysterectomies" how many would you say are doing it because the organ is diseased. (Not that the proposal is practical, of course.)
It might work with a C-section. Reassignment surgery isn’t stretchy enough for a live birth. For trans girls who start before male puberty they might get enough pelvic rotation for there to be enough room for it, though.
Not transfem myself, but considering the risk of tears and other unpleasantness from a vaginal birth I know I'd probably opt for a C-section if I were in that position regardless... recovering from bottom surgery once is tough enough without the miracle of life wreaking havoc on the place after :P
I've had my eye on the UTx op for the better part of the decade. It is my understanding that there's no medical reason to expect it would not be successful in a trans woman. I don't have recent numbers but we passed >100 uterine transplants a while back. The most complicated physical requirement is a functional vagina for discharge (which is generally on the roadmap for trans women interested in carrying a child).
I am unaware of trans women having received this operation yet, but Lili Elbe died after the first uterine transplant nearly 100 years ago, before the Nazi regime destroyed trans medicine and eradicated contemporary trans existence. Given the global climate, I don't expect any trans recipients to be eager for publicity. It will happen, and soon.
What would be the point of that? I'd be surprised if it got past an ethics committee.
Aside from this, the male pelvis isn't shaped to accommodate a womb, and males don't have the hormonal milieu to enable pregnancy.
The closest that researchers have come to having a male gestate a foetus was in rats. But they had to connect the bloodstream of the male rat to a pregnant female rat, where both were implanted with embryos at the same time. Even then, it worked less than 5% of the time.
> I can't help but wonder if there is any hope of this working for trans persons in the future?
why just trans? it would work on any male regardless of what they identify as if it were possible. No need for penis removal either, C-section would work.
Unless the procedure has changed dramatically, it requires a functional vagina. Neovaginas are qualified but I would not expect most male-identified people to opt for vaginoplasty.
> Unless the procedure has changed dramatically, it requires a functional vagina. Neovaginas are qualified but I would not expect most male-identified people to opt for vaginoplasty.
First, male-identified people can be born biological female. It's an identity.
Second, the procedure doesn't exist for biological males to begin with right now, neovagina or not. A neovagina is physiologically not a biological female vagina to begin with anyway so I wouldn't help at all with the gestation. Birth can be done via C-Section.
Trans men having babies is not strong evidence for cis men having less of a desire to give birth than trans women. If you have the equipment for it, it's going to happen some percent of the time.
> Trans men having babies is not strong evidence for cis men having less of a desire to give birth than trans women. If you have the equipment for it, it's going to happen some percent of the time.
It's strong evidence that the desire to birth child has nothing to do with gender identity, which latter will be pretty much pointless by the time science allows human fœtus gestation outside the human female body.
Apparently [1], it's not completely out of the question, but more research is needed before it can be safely attempted on a trans woman.
However, I fear the largest hurdle will be a political one, with so many nutjobs [2] so hell-bent on imposing their dogmatic definition of gender on everyone.
Ah yes, the nut jobs are the ones opposing what for almost all of human history, is something so far beyond the imagination as to be bordering on the grotesque.
You mean grotesque things like artificial insulin for making type 1 diabetes not a death sentence? Don’t confuse your own personal bigotry and small mindedness with what should be considered “grotesque”.
I always find it fascinating where people draw off the line at natural given modern life is closer to "life in plastic" than anything resembling nature. We stole fire from the gods, domesticated ourselves via agriculture, reshaped the world in our image, and have literally slain two of the four horsemen.
That's a very negative attitude. Think about how happy these women must be to have this procedure done. Just because something isn't natural doesn't mean it's horrible.
It's interesting how something that seems both incredible to me and genuinely gives me hope for the future of myself and many others can be viewed by others as horrific and a perversion, although I am a bit saddened to think about it.
People's perspectives give wildly different views on things.
It would be quite interesting to see how public discourse about gender is affected by this, and in particular if this procedure is done successfully on a transgender woman. Regardless of your political outlook, it will no longer be possible to say that the ability to give birth is a condition for being a woman. (And what will happen should chromosome replacement become possible? It seems unlikely that anyone would really invest in such a procedure, but is it medically feasible?)
Damn, it's almost like Gender is largely vibes and any attempt to root it in a strict biological standard is as patently ridiculous as it would be trying to do the same to horoscopes.
Giving birth is already not a precondition of being a woman, as the category "infertile women" exist.
If the procedures got so good that a trans woman/man was indistinguishable from one born that way who would still object to them claiming the gender they choose, most of the arguments fall apart at that point.
Almost everyone who opposes trans people's existence today. Opposition to trans rights is rooted in patriarchal hegemony and the control of bodies. Our existence is a fundamental threat to the foundational perspective of the predominant power-structure in society.
No one does a womb-check before granting women validity. It's always been a vibe thing and people who do not conform to the prescribed model of existence as a man or woman are constantly denied full privileges under the framework. It's not just trans women getting the short end of the stick here, it's everyone: men who do not embrace dominance culture or otherwise display "effeminacy" are denied true Man status, women who don't meet beauty standards or possess a submissive demeanor are slurred as bull-dykes or the dreaded transexual.
This isn't an issue with any real reasonable basis for it's opposition, it's a golem of pure hatred and disgust in a suit vs. people who want to live full, free lives.
editing to add: the first known uterine transplant was performed on Lili Elbe who received treatments through the Institute of Sexology in Germany. The Institute was famously destroyed by the Nazi regime. It's barely coincidental that fascism has risen again as medical science brings this technology to maturity. Trans women gave their lives for this medical miracle.
They would just move to calling the procedure a violation of the "natural order" - "Lovecraftian horror", "Frankenstein arrangement", "something Mengele would do" - argue that it is akin to rape, create conspiracy theories about uteri being stolen, and/or invoke "Think of the children!"
I saw all of that already. Some of it in this very thread, some of it on the defunct /r/GenderCritical: I remember someone proposing committing suicide by volcano to keep her uterus out of "male [sic] hands".
This is really cool but it's ultimately a stop-gap measure.
Where we want to end up is with artificial wombs because that will ultimately give individuals much more control over their reproduction and will do away with the onerous physiological and psychological stresses that pregnancy puts on women.
If everything scientific inquiry accomplishes is a “miracle”, then nothing is.
Is it a miracle I can go to JFK and fly through the air and be in Europe for dinner?
It’s a surgical procedure. It’s cool that it worked. We don’t need to invoke the supernatural here, especially given the oodles of hard work that went into this by very real and natural human beings.
For my money I would say, yes, and I think Louis C.K. was right when he said, "Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, 'Oh my God! Wow!' You're sitting in a chair in the sky!"
Yes, but by that logic we should be dumbfounded with awe every time we speak to turn on the lights, make a long distance call, eat a fresh fruit grown on another continent, or walk around after open heart surgery.
At some point we should just assign credit where credit is due: thousands upon thousands of people working very hard for many decades to make the impossible possible.
Our modern world is amazing, but it’s not miraculous. It’s achievement, not supernatural.
Whose baby is it? If I get a transplanted womb and have hundreds of kids are they mine of the original owners? I would assume the current owner, but Anglo laws tend to be completely backwards when it relates to sex.
From an individual perspective this is absolutely crazy and should never be done. But from a broader perspective it's clearly very beneficial for the advancement of science to have such fearless pioneers. Amazing stuff!
It's part of a clinical trial, and the staff donated their time, so I don't think that number tells you anything meaningful about what it would normally cost.
I don't think anyone in America is actually paying a bill for $300,000 for a transplant. It's either paid for by insurance, or if someone doesn't have insurance, via hospital charity or a state medical aid plan. The only exception would be an absurdly rich person who doesn't have insurance.
Don’t worry, our current President promises to be the “fertilisation President” and is pushing to cover IVF and other fertility treatments mandatory on isursnfr.
The negotiated rate is still super high. There are procedures where it costs less to fly overseas and get it done self-pay than the out-of-pocket cost with insurance in the US.
If someone is low income and doesn’t have insurance, they should apply for state Medicaid or other assistance programs. These programs exist and are very helpful.
While yes they should, that is still going to be minimal coverage that doesn't cover tons of stuff, especially something like voluntary uterus transplant.
It varies by state, but in some Medicaid is some of the best coverage you can get. (I have a personal mission to dispel the myth that poor Americans can't access health care, because often they can - and spreading the idea they can't leads to adverse health outcomes.) Specifically, patients aren't ever charged for anything.
Uterus transplants are still experimental. The only ones I could find in the U.S. are in clinical trials and are being paid for by the institution to people accepted into the program, such as the one at John Hopkins.
There are not gynecologists (yet) charging $200,000 for uterus transplants in America.
It’s incredible and Inwish long life and happiness to the newborn and her family
I would like to reflect on the timing of this - the UK Supreme Court just ruled something about a woman is a “biological” definition - and I am willing to put a lot of money on many people on both sides of that contentious debate struggling with the idea that “someone born without a womb is a woman” and “hey we can transplant wombs now”
Thousands of scientists and medical practitioners have taken thousands of baby steps to get to this point. We should fund every single one of them - we never know where research will take us.
It’s not that confusing. “Has a womb” is not a common definition of “woman”. Women don’t stop being women after having a hysterectomy.
The woman in question is a woman because her sexual differentiation followed the female pathway. Just because in her case that pathway led to a DSD variant doesn’t undo the rest of her female development or make her a little bit less of a woman, or male, or a third sex.
There's at least four common definitions of "woman", and I have in fact seen people use "has a womb" as one of them despite, as you may guess, all the people piling on immediately with a reply along the lines of what you yourself say — that this would exclude women who have had a hysterectomy.
The other three I've commonly seen are:
(1) as you suggest, developmental pathway — which tends to trip people up over androgen insensitivity, and is also why puberty blockers are part of the public debate
(2) chromosomes — which has the problem of 0.6-1.0% of the population doing something else besides the normal XX/XY
and (3) current external physical appearance — which tends to lead to confusion by both transvestites in public, and also in private by anyone who has had top surgery but not bottom surgery.
Why do you use the the Nazi demographic term "transvestite?"
(also, you should just not talk about trans people as you display immense ignorance in a very short time, you clearly have a concept of trans bodies that is rooted in fascist propaganda: trans women on HRT develop breasts without surgery).
I promise I'm asking this question in good faith because I would genuinely love to understand your reasoning: why does the term "transvestite" have anything to do with Nazism?
From what I remember, that word was common and acceptable when I was growing up in the 90s, and I don't remember any Nazis using it. Nor did anyone tell me that the word "transvestite" was derogatory or offensive, although if social mores have shifted then fine, I won't say it.
I suspect there may have been a misunderstanding of my earlier comment that led to this chain.
Where I wrote above:
> current external physical appearance — which tends to lead to confusion by both transvestites in public
That wasn't a statement about being transgender. I was saying that people judge clothing, and are confused by that clothing. "Public" being about clothing, because there aren't many public places where you're going to see enough skin for anything else to cause confusion.
I did intend to type "Nazi era", though I find the clarification is meaningless to the point. I'm all for reclaiming words, but I am unaware of any significant efforts to reclaim and promote the word in question. It is anachronistic and inextricably connected to 20th century transphobia and violence against trans women in particular
Re: your second point, a closer reading of the comments will show that this thread is discussing "women."
e: The far more interesting discussion is whether the revival of eugenics-era language is justifiable. This is hardly the first example on this site of arrogant commentators casually reviving language that came to be understood as hateful in the 20th century.
> I am unaware of any significant efforts to reclaim and promote the word in question. It is anachronistic and inextricably connected to 20th century transphobia and violence against trans women in particular
It's the primary term I grew up with in the UK specifically about what is also called cross-dressing.
> Re: your second point, a closer reading of the comments will show that this thread is discussing "women."
1) Quite a lot of transphobes focus entirely on women, thus ignoring how their own rules end up forcing trans men to end up in women's-only spaces.
2) I am informed that many trans women have implants before hormones. In fact, one woman I know openly discussed face surgery as part of her transition.
Also: cis women have breast surgery. I'm told most often as a reduction. Facebook, in its complete uselessness, has advertised the surgery to me along with dick pills.
isn’t having a functioning uterus a hard prerequisite to the ability to produce ova?
“is developed to produce ova” is a statement about current capability. If they meant to include women with hysterectomies, they would have worded it differently, like “is or once was developed to produce ova;” if they meant to include women with non-functioning wombs, they would have written more broadly, like “is of the type that usually produces ova” or something.
The answer is a yes, as in, the ovaries can still ovulate even without a uterus. The ovaries also continue to produce hormones, through there are a feedback loop between the uterus and ovaries which get disrupted without a uterus.
It is somewhat similar to how men with vasectomy still produce sperm.
A friend of mine takes estrogen and has breasts, feminine voice, etc. Her body’s arguably taken both sexual differentiation pathways over the years. I think even this definition isn’t so clear-cut.
Body modification through technology doesn’t really encroach on the scientific classification of the natural world. The Vacanti mouse which had an apparent human ear grown on its back was an amazing thing in its own right, but its existence doesn’t mean we need to update our understanding of what a mouse is.
Depends why you need to know and with what level of accuracy. Just looking at their face is about 96%-98% accurate[0], and becomes even more accurate when other cues are available such as voice, gait, and build. For casual purposes, humans are incredibly good at predicting sex, without any technology or scientific understanding. One might speculate that being able to accurately find a mate is an evolutionary advantage.
For the last few fractions of a percent accuracy, a SRY cheek swab test is a simple non-invasive screening test that can flag individuals for further investigation. World Athletics have just implemented this test, stating it is “a highly accurate proxy for biological sex”.[1] A positive result in this screening test could be combined with a finger prick test for testosterone level to provide further information, and at this point we’re into methods of medical diagnosis of DSDs. About 1 in 5000 individuals will have a DSD, some of which are still unambiguously male or female (e.g. XXY Klinefelter syndrome), and some of which are almost unique individuals that defy categorization.
At this point, it is popular to seize on those rare individuals and declare “aha! So sex isn’t binary then! So it must be a spectrum!”, and while this is surely well-intentioned, it is scientifically illiterate.[2] I suspect part of the confusion is interpreting “binary” as a mathematical Boolean value (where exceptions cannot, by definition, exist) rather than as a scientific classification, where exceptions can and do exist and “prove the rule”.
> I would like to reflect on the timing of this - the UK Supreme Court just ruled something about a woman is a “biological” definition - and I am willing to put a lot of money on many people on both sides of that contentious debate struggling with the idea that "someone born without a womb is a woman" and "hey we can transplant wombs now"
MRKH syndrome is a disorder of female sex development, and if you look at this from the perspective of developmental biology it's clear that anyone affected by this must be a woman. I feel it shouldn't be too hard an idea to struggle with.
That they have a working womb transplant technique is impressive from a medical technology point of view but I think not enough has been said about the ethics of this experimentation.
Personally I wouldn't risk exposing my baby to transplant anti-rejection drugs. We don't know how this may impact the short-term or long-term health of the baby.
As I understand it, the court ruled that specifically within the text of the 2010 Equality Act, where it says 'woman' with no qualifier, that refers only to biological females. I do not know how many such places there are, but other parts of the act do apparently refer to other women and that they should not be discriminated against in the same way.
The court is really saying that the lawmakers did not specify properly what they meant in certain cases and that they should probably modify those sections (they are carefully not to tell Parliament what to do), which can be done and does sometimes get done when such things crop up.
> but other parts of the act do apparently refer to other women and that they should not be discriminated against in the same way
Yes, the act (as it should) protects people from discrimination based on gender reassignment, e.g. you can't fire someone for their gender identity or deny them from a service.
The act makes it illegal to discriminate against someone due to their "sex", but a portion of the act allowed for "single sex" spaces where there is reasonable grounds to have them, but the act (reasonably at the time) did not define what sex was.
A piece of Scottish legislation referred to "woman as defined by the Equality Act", but the Equality Act never said if it was referring to biological sex or gender identity, the Scottish government said it would include people with gender reassignment certificates, a "woman's rights" charity disagreed. Hence the court got involved and found the original intention was to refer to biological sex, which was confirmed by the politician that introduced the Equality Act (Harriet Harman).
On the important issue of discrimination, Clause 9 makes it clear that a transsexual person would have protection under the Sex Discrimination Act as a person of the acquired sex or gender. Once recognition has been granted, they will be able to claim the rights appropriate to that gender.
- Lord Filkin, the Minister who introduced the Gender Recognition Bill in the House of Lords in 2003 (18th December)
The biotech coming down the line will make our current culture wars seem like a disagreement between two best friends.
All of the following are nearly possible today:
+ A man implanted with a womb giving birth.
+ A woman stealing genetic material and creating a baby, the gender of the second parent is irrelevant here.
+ A woman wanting an abortion, instead having the fetus removed and placed in an artificial womb under the care of the father.
And one that I was working on:
+ Farm animals grown with their brains shut off, used as compute substrate for biological neural networks, while their biological functions are controlled remotely.
> Farm animals grown with their brains shut off, used as compute substrate for biological neural networks, while their biological functions are controlled remotely.
I’m sorry, you were working on what? Where does one learn more about this concept?
One builds the tools to run the experiments to discover the rules.
The closest are FinalSpark and CorticalLabs, but they both are only using in vitro neurons as the computational substrate.
Neuralink et al. are working in vivo, but they are only doing output and don't have any plans to do input, let alone to actively disrupt normal neural activity and take control of bodily processes.
If you're very interested feel free to drop me a line.
This is not actually a struggle whatsoever, it only is if you pretend it is thus. Humans have 2 legs and 2 arms. It I was born without legs, am I still a human?
Here's another one for you, given how many people care about XX/XY as a distinction of gender: Humans have 46 chromosomes, but by this definition, about 0.6–1.0% of live births from human mothers are of individuals who aren't human.
Language is a tool we use to create categories, don't let language use you. Insisting that everything in reality must conform to the categories that language already has, is mistaking the map for the territory.
Language is more than a tool, though. It's how we understand reality. My native language is English, I speak a little Spanish, more than a little German, and used to speak some other stuff (the use it or lose it kind). And in every effort to learn those language you, well, learn things about how to structure your thought and understanding of things. I think you're mistaking my point for something else.
In learning German as an adult, one thing I keep noticing is how a single word in one language is several in the other.
English: Times, German: Mal or Zeiten.
"Every time" is "jedes Mal", but "good times" is "gute Zeiten". "Three times four" uses "mal".
And every time a new thing gets invented, found, or imported, neologisms pop up, or words get borrowed from other cultures. In English, robins are said to have "red breasts", because the colour orange had not yet been coined when the bird needed a name, because the fruit after which the colour is named had not yet arrived.
People also argue about if "vegetarian hamburgers" is a sensible term, as if the "ham" implies meat, even though (1) the meat varieties usually use beef, and (2) it's named after the place Hamburg.
Before the development of hormonal and surgical solutions, the only thing trans people could do was change their clothes. At some point, the medical options are so capable that any given previous definition of gender becomes malleable. A womb implant is one such option.
Sure, but Mal and Zeit intentionally elicit different contextual meanings. The literal word is the same in English but it's quite obvious that the context is different, and in German the context calls for a different word. English, while being within the Germanic language family, isn't as particular in many ways as German can be or is. If you can speak multiple languages surely you understand what I am getting at. Vegetarian "hamburgers" is a poor example because, well, the point of calling something a "vegetarian hamburger" is that it resembles a _real_ hamburger, which would contain meat. Thus, you now understand my point about changing language in this regard.
> Thus, you now understand my point about changing language in this regard.
I really don't.
As I say in such discussions, "you're only allowed to call them 'hamburgers' if they're from the Hamburg region, otherwise it's just a sparkling fried patty".
If you’re writing laws, your choice of language matters quite a lot. “Humans have 2 legs and 2 arms” alongside “humans are entitled to unalienable rights” could lead to foreseeable problems, so specifying in your writing that “humans typically have two legs and two arms” would be a smarter bet. It’s not important in a hacker news comment, but is important in law.
That's a gross oversimplification. Virilisation is a complex process with many factors.
If you're still human if you're born without legs then clearly neither genetic or developmental traits determine someone's humanity.
So at what point do we call someone a woman born without a uterus? When a 'normal' pregnancy would have resulted in them having a uterus? When different genetics would have resulted in them having a uterus? Or when she herself complains that she lacks a uterus?
I'm applying the same logic, I'm not simplifying anything. You are using the word "humanity" to mean something different from what the rest of the thread is talking about. To address what I think your point is, many wish to expand the malleability of basic biological concepts based on edge cases. Edge cases for which we already have definitions and categories. You are doing so now, by attempting to entrench ambiguity on the entire concept of "woman" by observing that the woman in TFA was born with a specific, heritable, abnormality that prevented the nominal development of a uterus.
I don’t think anyone struggles with “someone born without a womb is a woman.”
When a woman is born without a womb, the doctors should investigate and figure out why that is. Is something else missing? Could there be other issues? A diagnosis should be made.
No such investigation is necessary when a man is born without a womb.
The Supreme Court wasn’t deciding anything other than the intention of an existing law and the meaning of the words in that law (which were unclear enough to require clarification). BOTH sides of the debate claiming that the Supreme Court has now defined what constitutes a “woman” are wrong and doing nothing but polarising people for their own selfish gain.
This ^. It was your standard run-of-the-mill statutory interpretation case. Limited to a single badly defined statute, written somewhat carelessly. This is common for statutes.
What often happens is that a "supreme" court like this will file an opinion attempting to clarify the meaning as best they can, but it really requires a statutory amendment by the legislators to fix it. Often that is what happens next.
Unfortunately when you try to explain this to people, the most common response (regardless of which side they're on) is to express that "Yes, but OUR side is right, so misrepresenting the ruling in our favor is right too."
People are rightly judged for saying they're "in the middle" because too often their "middle" is just whatever they perceptually decided the position of the left and right was and then they picked their position in reaction to that, rather then out of any consideration of the issue.
People love to be "in the middle" and thus "reasonable".
You're both right. We don't distinguish between the reasonable middle grounders and the unreasonable ones. More broadly, we don't distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable arguments. We never have. Truth as determined by humans is basically a popularity contest.
This is why the entire exercise of finding a place on a political spectrum is a trap and a scam, the only thing that really matters:
Are you an extremist or a moderate? Because I can get along with a moderate person on the left, right, or anywhere in between. By the same token extremists regardless of stripe are unbearable.
Nothing in nature can ever be described with 100% accuracy by any model. But that doesn't mean models are useless. So imagine why we would use the binary sex model instead of three or a spectrum or what have you.
Simple models are useful, but they shouldn't determine who is allowed to live a normal, productive, life without some very compelling justification. Like the "binary sex model" is handy, but nothing about it makes it obvious that we should definitely and always lock gender (another non-binary model often simplified usefully into a binary) directly to biological sex.
Is a bimodal distribution, or a somewhat reductive “typical male, typical female, intersex” model, so difficult to understand that we can’t use it? I don’t think people are stupid.
You may be thinking of species like the white-throated sparrow. These have two morphs with distinct behaviours which lead to there being four mating combinations. Still two sexes though.
You don’t hear about it because everybody understands that disabled people exist and the broad consensus is that we should accept them, and assist them to a reasonable degree. There’s little reason to discuss it. If people born with less than 4 limbs were subjected to the same treatment trans people get, you’d better believe we’d be out here talking about how not everybody has 4 limbs and we should accept that.
> You don’t hear about it because everybody understands that disabled people exist and the broad consensus is that we should accept them, and assist them to a reasonable degree. There’s little reason to discuss it. If people born with less than 4 limbs were subjected to the same treatment trans people get, you’d better believe we’d be out here talking about how not everybody has 4 limbs and we should accept that.
Not intending to debate the ethics of abortion, but one of the reasons foetuses are aborted is due to disability, down syndrome being a notable example.
You’ll note that the people who oppose abortion generally also oppose aborting fetuses with disabilities. And among people who support abortion, a decent proportion also oppose aborting fetuses because of disabilities.
That's plain wrong. For example, the overwhelming majority of people in Iceland supports abortion rights AND abortion of pregnancies where there is the potential for down syndrom and other larger disabilities. Same goes for me, in general.
Do you think it’s interesting to respond to a general claim with a rebuttal based on a tiny and relatively insular population? The county I live in has 3x more people than the entirety of Iceland.
Here’s a poll of Americans that includes a question about aborting fetuses with Down Syndrome. 44% of pro-choice respondents oppose it. I’m not wrong and there’s no reason to find that sentence suspect. https://www.kofc.org/en/resources/communications/polls/maris...
I mean, congenital limb differences are quite literally a spectrum. An entire limb can be absent, or just part(s) of it, or most of the limb can be present but irregularly formed...
You can even mix and match with which parts are present vs absent. I know someone with an arm that stops just above the elbow but still has several (usable!) fingers extending from it. So no joint, but sorta-yes hand.
As far as I'm aware, no one is born with both sets of working reproductive organs and in most cases there is still a "dominant" gene expression, and only some extremely rare cases where current tests fall short.
So I don't see 1 in 1500 people being oppressed by the court ruling.
Sex is binary to a similar degree that humans are born with 10 fingers and 10 toes. Nothing in nature is fixed 100% of the times, but rather exist on a line of probabilities.
thanks for the link. and the section in controversy is really worth reading for nuance and thoughtful conversation.
the humans with intersex conditions themselves object the term, as it tags them as sick, a "disease". their personal experience based political interventions have lead to the prohibition of cosmetic surgeries on genitals of minors, or forced hormonal sex assignment on minors, in several European countries that is. so they can decide on their own when they are old enough. that's all the personally affected humans ask for, for the next generation: let them be as they are and allow them to decide on their own.
It's really offensive to tell people with DSDs they aren't their sex. Sex is binary. People with DSDs are female or male, except for extremely rare cases.
>it’s really offensive to tell people with DSDs they aren’t their sex.
Not really true. Some people maybe.
>Sex is binary
Sex is complicated. Traits cluster bimodally, but it would be reductive, scientifically inaccurate, to say it’s a simple binary.
>People with DSDs are female or male
That depends on how female and male are categorized. The line between in the trait cluster and outside of the trait cluster is arbitrary. So it depends where you draw that line.
You can't say "$TRAIT is binary" when you follow that up with "$TRAIT can only be true, false, or sometimes something else". That's not a binary trait by definition.
What? Sex is a spectrum, this is a fact. There are people born with testicles and rudimentary ovaries. There are people born with breasts and long penis-like clitorides. I encourage you to try and not categorize everything into neat little boxes.
The word you're looking for is "bimodal distribution".
The spectrum of sex characteristics is a bimodal distribution with two peaks. and the vast majority of all humans fall close to one of the two peaks peaks. however, they indeed exist medically classified circumstances for bodily sexual expression that is not on one of the peaks but somewhere in between.
and the percentage of those not close to the peaks is heavily contested and varies between 1 in 15000 ( putting extremely high bars on "uh wen can't tell") to 17 in 1000 (counting for example a larger clit as a penis-y ambiguous thing)
bimodal distribution with distinct peaks and a low but non-zero density between the peaks.
To add to the other reply, nearly 100% of people classified as men at birth do have mammary glands and can lactate if they take certain medication. Some men can lactate without medication.
But that's my whole point, "sex" a spectrum and it's one of the big lies perpetuated by people who insist everything was known and set in stone, when their bible was invented, despite never having microscopes or telescopes or even eyeglasses
You do not need microscopes, telescopes, or even eyeglasses to determine sex differences. The existence of chromosomal abnormalities does not mean we need to change the meaning of words.
and you can tell with the naked eye that an intersex baby is intersex, and neither "properly" male or female. except when the baby looks very female but is genetically male due to androgen insensitivity syndrome. then you need that microscope again...
kindergarten level logic fails at physiological sex ambiguity.
and it fails even more so at gender identity issues.
Not following your point, unless it's merely to say that parsing observable reality isn't good enough to determine the precise levels of hormones flowing through someone's body, which, fine. That's certainly true. However ... physiological characteristics are in fact dictated to a large extent by hormones, and as a result one can realistically make a good inference about e.g. who has more testosterone.
my point is: biological sex follows a bimodal distribution with some in-between data points that are not trivially assignable to one or the other pole, called "intersex" humans. they are a biological, medical reality, and they themselves ask to leave children alone and allow them to decide when and if at all they want medical interventions.
I can tell you that in Czechia and former East Germany, two most atheist places in the Western world, the concept of sex as a spectrum isn't especially popular either. People can be somewhat socially conservative without believing in the bible.
did you read the link? there are humans with ambiguous genitals (fka "intersex"), there are women with androgen insensitivity, genitally xy, born as perfect little girls, vulva and all, but alas, testicles. bummer
The woman in the article has a DSD that only affects female sex development. Plus she has working ovaries. From either of these facts one can conclude that she is female.
I don't know why you think this is a conservative lie. It is not.
> Would only have the sister's DNA if it was an ovary transplant.
Fun fact: fetal cells transmit back to the mother and can be spotted in virtually every organ afterwards - it's called "Fetomaternal cell microchimerism" [1].
It's not a far stretch to assume the transfer works also the other way around and you can detect maternal DNA in the fetus/child, but I'm not aware if there has been research around that.
This is interesting to me at the margins, because one of the things I learned when my wife got pregnant the first time was that the womb is not exactly the warm cradle of nurturing that I had always (without thinking much about it) imagined, but in many ways a blast door or containment vessel to protect the mother (host) from the fetus (roughly, xenomorph) that would otherwise explode like an aggressive parasite (killing them both).
So I mean, you probably don't want to have any leaks or weak stitches in your uterus transplant...
Keywords: fetal microchimerism, placental barrier, trophoblast invasion
This is just a fact of reality for any women that have children though.
Eg male chromosomes from fetuses being found in women’s brains: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3458919/
(I don’t think this is believed to be unusual or an example of ‘containment failure’ of the womb)
It appears it may even be protective.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-pregnancy-is-a-biological-war-bet...
Red in tooth and claw at every layer, from the smallest cell to the entire biosphere.
Amazing article. Another reason that hardshelled laid eggs are such a great invention. The offspring can do its thing from a safe distance.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-06-term-bird-brain.html
I can't find the original video, but Suzana Herculano-Houzel developed a technique to measure total neuron counts by liquefying the brain and then counting the cell nucleus density / volume.
WSU Master Class: Big Brains, Small Brains with Suzana Herculano-Houzel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDM3TcfGoBY
(nice short popsci intro) The woman who turns brains into soup: Suzana Herculano-Houzel https://youtu.be/d2Uhv0_Ji1k?t=362 (talks about racoon and bird brains)
https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2017/09/07/brainiac-with-her-inn...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
This paper is really fun, "Brains matter, bodies maybe not: the case for examining neuron numbers irrespective of body size" https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Brains-matter%2C-bodie...
Crows fly, mate for life and are considered positive for the ecosystem. Humans do taxes.
Most birds’ nests are built much more intricately than just a pile of sticks thrown together! Usually built from layers of different materials, sometimes weaved or plastered with mud/clay/bird-spit.
E.g. sparrows pick up lavender in my garden, because the oils repel some pests etc.
There are many articles about bird intelligence available from multiple sources.
A more open minded perspective would instead try to look to what is "remotely close" to a human brain.
Although primates can't quite communicate like humans, they are known for being our closest relatives in scientific biological terms.
I know I am deviating from the birds subject a little, but stick with me. I need to address the "remotely close" expression you used.
Primates can display what humans would recognize as human behavior. Work in groups, social dynamics, use of simple tools.
The "looks like human" effect could be explained by anthropomorphization performed by those very humans (to put it simply: an effect where humans see human features in non human things). In fact, some behaviors considered as human are not commonly displayed by primates, like the ability to keep a pet. There is no clear definitive answer to it, and any dismissal of such behaviors could be also used to dismiss humans themselves, therefore I must refrain from entertaining them too much.
Birds also show a lot of human like behavior. Like the ability to gather objects (to construct a nest and to attract a partner are common examples).
Remember, the closest thing to humans in anatomy and biology (primates) is not very much different from birds in terms of "how it presents human-like" behavior.
So, as a counter argument, I would ask: what makes the difference of thinking between a primate and a bird so different to you? Is it their anatomy that prevents you from anthropomorphizing it so readily? Or do you also think primate brains are "nothing remotely close to a human brain"?
It cannot be denied that "closeness" is a loose definition and could generate endless discussion. I tried to concede a little bit to find a reasonable common ground that is both based on rational thinking and a little bit of open mindedness.
Under such criteria, I can assert that birds might be much more intelligent than previously assumed.
Thank you, stranger!
For my part, I'll add that "Humans are visual creatures", which biases every aspect of our culture -- and might help explain why many would consider other primates "closer" to us than birds.
1) the ability to plan ahead of time 2) in a non innate way
The consequence is that humans actually build stuff by investing time and energy by visualizing a future benefit without immediate gratification. I believe this is unique in the realm of animals, at least for now.
It has been reported that some eagles and hawks spread fire to drive out prey from dense vegetation. Whether that is learned behavior and planning for the future, a previously undiscovered innate behavior, or just a myth, depends on results of further research.
Whales wearing salmon hats is a story that, if happens to be true, would also be a non-innate behavior, whose purpose we don't know, that could point to something close to what you described.
Humans are different, I cannot disagree.
My play was to challenge our assumptions of what that perceived distance from humans to animals is consisted of.
We can come up with increasingly more convoluted ways of defining what we are. Animals can't. Maybe that is our innate ability.
The article says it goes back a lot further than Rome!
> So if it’s a fight, what started it? The original bone of contention is this: you and your nearest relatives are not genetically identical. In the nature of things, this means that you are in competition. And because you live in the same environment, your closest relations are actually your most immediate rivals.
Human behavior, however, is still a deep, deep mystery in terms of evolutionary biology. I'm always wary of people applying evolutionary principles to human behaviors. Writ large you can see contours of what we would expect to see, but even then it's unclear why the boundaries are where they are, or to what degree we're projecting expectations into the data, etc. The speculation quotient is extreme. I wouldn't put any stock into evolutionary biology-based explanations for human behavior. And just as a practical matter, it's not like most people would leave their most hated cousin to die in a ditch; and though most people wouldn't leave anyone to die in a ditch--at least, if they knew that's what they were doing--I'm betting they're more likely to save a cousin than a stranger.
Our capacity for stories and language helps us create large cooperation networks, which is a unique evolutionary advantage.
Chimps have cooperation limited to "we are genetically close and you give me banana so I give you banana".
Humans can create something like the Roman Republic, or modern nation states and corporations, based on a shared set of stories and language (culture, also includes stuff like rituals, socio-sexual taboos, etc), which enables millions of us to collaborate together towards a common goal. Which is why we're so successful as a species.
All of those people might be selfish, yet they still work together without even knowing they are doing so.
What's "homini" supposed to mean?
Homini is the declination of Homo, is dative case. I don't know how to properly translate dative to english, something like "to give".
I know this from Philosophy and Latin (separate) in Highschool around the nineties in Spain. They both were compulsory global subjects. I think Latin is not compulsory this days.
And kiwi kiwi kiwi.
Couldn't help myself, being a speaker of a language with grammatical cases, which allows the translation of "homo homini lupus" without changing the grammatical structure. At the same time, some loanwords escape the declination system, giving birth to the joke above.
The quote from Plautus appears to be lupus est homo homini, which is much easier to parse. There's a verb and everything. (I didn't know that; I just looked it up.)
> I don't know how to properly translate dative to english, something like "to give".
Yes, the word literally means "giving [case]", but the grammatical concept in English is generally called "indirect object". English mostly doesn't have cases, so supplemental arguments to verbs tend to be marked by associated prepositions, making them "indirect".
When talking about Latin specifically or languages with noun case in general, it is normal in English to refer to the "dative case"; you don't really need to translate it.
I assume the case was named after the action of giving because giving is a very common action that necessarily involves three things. (Giver, gift, and recipient.) The name tells you what it means by example: "if a gift is given, the dative case is the one you'd use for the recipient".
The phrase is a latin proverb meaning, roughly, "A man is a wolf to another man".
But about a month before birth things switch around. The womb partially disconnects from control systems of the mother's body and ... there's an extremely scary way of pointing this out I once heard from a medical professor: "you know just about the only thing a human body can still do when it's decapitated? It can give birth"
In less extreme circumstances, you actually have a switch in your circulatory system ... when pregnancy gets to this point and the mother's body loses power, it will initiate a rapid birthing process, and start shutting down organ after organ to give birth with the remaining power. That includes, eventually, the brain. Only the heart, lungs, liver and womb will remain operational. The body will shut down blood flow to the brain to continue giving birth. Once shut down it cannot be turned back on. So this kills the mother, despite the body remaining functional, in some reported cases, for over an hour, and is something gynaecologists get trained to prevent from happening.
Given how common it was even a century ago for women to die giving birth, one wonders how often this mechanism was involved.
> In extremely rare forensic cases, a phenomenon called "coffin birth" (post-mortem fetal extrusion) can occur, where gases from decomposition expel a fetus from the deceased mother's body. This is not true childbirth and is extremely rare, occurring only under specific post-mortem conditions.
The blood supply and nerves are weird special cases in a great many ways. For instance, they're not left-right symmetric (whereas the ones of "nearby" systems, like the bladder, are. So this was not done because there's only one womb)
the body has a lot of messaging systems; 'completely paralyzed' people still enjoy the use of many chemical messaging signals; they just generally have a hindered spinal cord or neurological interface element.
A paralyzed person will still go into shock after a dismemberment, blood-flow will be affected by vaso-constriction, and so on. It doesn't surprise me to hear that childbirth can trigger a similar set of conditions to occur.
And that belittles the existence of the underlying support nervous system and the secondary elements. Many completely paralyzed men can achieve erection and ejaculation even with a near total disconnect from the rest of the nervous system. Why? The parasympathetic nervous system and secondary nervous materials in the region in question are taking up the slack from the brain and still allowing 'normal' function.
I don't
You would not have survived more than a few weeks past birth in the absence of modern medical interventions — well, that part at least was true for most of us — but specifically an inability to process milk as an infant is very rare, precisely because "mammary" is what puts the "mam" in "mammal".
It puts the "mamm" in; that second m is also part of the root.
To segue from your post, I was adopted as an only child at birth, so formula was the only option. No IgA exposure, which probably over-taxed my early immune system.
But in being adopted, I have very nontraditional feelings about cloning, artificial birth, etc. I knew about my adoption from an early age, so it deeply worked itself into my thinking. At about elementary school age, some of my asshole neighbors bullied and called me a bastard, but that didn't really impact me as much as the feeling of being a genetic island completely alien to everyone else. All of my peers were related to their birthing parents and sometimes clonal siblings, yet I was alone in the universe. My weird hobbies and behaviors and preferences were out of the norm for my family. Despite my closeness with them, I didn't feel the same as everyone else around me. I wasn't. I was a nerd, absorbed into science books and Bill Nye. The southern culture and football and Christian God I grew up around wasn't my home, and I couldn't understand it just as others couldn't understand me. Everyone talks about blood as being a big deal - it's even in the foundation of the religion I was raised in - but to me, it meant nothing. It really shaped how I feel about humanity and biology and families and reproduction and the universe. Ideas, not nucleotides, are the information that matters.
I've understated and undersold how fundamentally differently this makes me feel about people.
Because of my perspective, I have controversial viewpoints about human biology. I don't find them weird at all, but there's a good chance it'll offend you:
If we can ever get over the societal (religious?) ick factor, perhaps we could one day clone MHC-negative, O-negative, etc. monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs. Use genetic engineering to de-encephalize the brain, and artificially innervate the spine and musculature. We'd have a perfect platform for every kind of organ and tissue transplant, large scale controlled in situ studies, human knockouts, and potentially crazy things like whole head transplants to effectively cure all cancers and aging diseases except brain cancers and neurodegeneration.
Because they're clones engineered to not expose antigens, their tissues could be transplanted into us just like plants being grafted. No immunosuppressants. This might become the default way to cure diseases in the future. We could even engineer bodies that increase our physiological capacity. Increased endurance, VO2 max, younger age, different sex, skin color, transgenic features. Alien hair colors. You name it.
I bring things like this up and get ostracized and criticized. But it feels completely normal to me. Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.
In light of how others think, I don't think I'd have these thoughts so comfortably if I didn't feel like something of a clone already. A genetic reject, an extraterrestrial growing up, tends to think differently.
Flipping this around, your aversion to this is because you have a mother and father that birthed you that you share blood with. That you grew up in a god fearing society bathed in his sacrificial blood. If you were like me, perhaps you'd think like me.
I'm totally perplexed that other people find this disgusting or horrifying. It feels wholly natural.
And we should absolutely do it.
> Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.
I feel like this is not obvious. Many people seem to want to enjoy life more than anything else, and if this biotech means curing cancer so they can do so for longer, sure, but at some point it may be too invasive. Like if you have to undergo a procedure every year to get diminishing returns. A lot of the features you mention are nice to have, but not strongly appealing to me personally. Particularly for something like immortality: if I'm going to have that, I want a lot of other things too that biotech won't obtain.
Also, at that level of biotech, it seems like we could forgo the clones and enhance our bodies directly. That would remove the ethical concerns of cloning, in particular the notion of creating clones for our own purposes instead of letting them reach their own. Beliefs that boil down to "I was here first" or "I beat you" are common, but I find them problematic.
Birth/creation is a fascinating philosophical topic. I have a radical view which isn't quite "life is suffering so being born is a net harm", but I think that life is not all that valuable. I won't go out of my way to harm existing life, but I'm not sure I should go out of my way to accomodate new life. If humans all died off naturally, would that be such a bad thing? Life is great, but it's not that great. If we do gain cloning technology, I think we should afford clones the potential to do as they will, just as we want for ourselves. Again, we could probably obviate clones for the purposes you see.
It does not offend me. I cannot say if I would be upset if this were to be turned from idea to reality because the closest thing in reality is quite upsetting; but because I think that the only part of a body capable of suffering is the CNS, I also regard any potential upset on my part about a realisation of your idea as a "me problem", not a "you problem".
That said, I don't know how far we are from being able to perfom what you suggest, even in principle.
It may well be the case that growing a full human without a CNS is harder than solving 3D bioprinting.
One downside of such a degree of biological mastery, is that it does to trust in real life what AI is currently doing to trust online.
> If we can ever get over the societal (religious?) ick factor
I believe those kinds of "ick" factors are there for a reason - protecting us from a descent into deep dystopia or something.
Implementing new human things at scale often has unanticipated indirect negative consequences.
My guess is for many of us, our gut says "looks like a human therefore is human"; if you try to tell gut instinct it's fine because there's no brain, you're gut's response is "Brain and brain! What is brain?"
My gut seems to care more about dynamic behaviour than static appearance, but for what it's worth — and despite being able to understand the premise of @echelon's suggestion without being upset by it — even I find images of a real, natural, human birth defect where the brain is missing, to be horrifying (content warning: do not google "anencephaly" unless you're strong stomached).
It's a typical Hollywood sci-fi film with the usual Hollywood lessons and platitudes.
We wouldn't be producing clones with brains or consciousness. We might even have to modify the spine and stomach.
So there's no thinking at all. They'd be like plants.
unlike man-made machines, we do not fully understand our bodies yet, and as such should be careful when trying to make them better. Don't start randomly `rf -rf *` on a Unix system if you don't know what it does, don't start randomly using steroids if you aren't sure of the long term biological consequences.
Obviously, your proposed "monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs" would help with that.
If you'll also allow me a quick remark on your upbringing, as someone from an intellectual Parisian family who grew up in God-fearing, football-loving Texas...
I'm sure that somewhere in the South, there is a little gay kid, or one born with an odd mutation, to his birth parents, who felt or feels the exact same way you did - as something of an alien. I believe that the vast majority of cultures will produce outsiders, and it's also very probable that somewhere in Paris, there is someone who doesn't feel at home in the midst of heavy intellectual conversation and would prefer a simpler world focused on traditional religion and football (possibly association football/soccer, rather than American football).
Humans can form 'tribes', in the loosest sense of the word possible, based on genetics, but we also form tribes based on similar beliefs, values and interests - for example, Hacker News :)
I agree with this, and I'm glad we do. But I've posted the "let's harvest clones for organs" idea numerous times on HN -- a community where many of us are on somewhat of a similar wavelength. It's usually met with a lot of vitriol and disgust.
> Obviously, your proposed "monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs" would help with that.
That's one of the nice things about this. It would give us an organismal research platform where we could replicate experiments. No more animal studies, imperfect chimera systems, or molecular experiments we can't scale up. We'd have a perfect test bed for investigating almost everything that ails us.
I think this is a useful insight even on a higher level. For evolution (if you want to anthropomorphize it), war and conflict are just another set of tools in the toolbox. Where humans see those as evidence of something going wrong and evil to eradicated, for evolution it's "working as intended".
(Or, if you don't want to anthropomorphize it, an indication how much of evolution and biology is just barely tamed chaos)
(Careful to draw conclusions for human society from this though. People in the past had already seen the Darwinian "struggle between the species" as a model for society, which brought "Social Darwinism" and ultimately the Nazi ideology.
A different conclusion would be that biology is in fact not a perfect ideal to aspire to, and even in the situations where it "works", its factual objectives are not always the same as ours. Which does give legitimacy for the endeavor to improve upon it - for everyone)
"And so while the cooperative outcome would be the most efficient, you lead to a situation in which there are conflict costs, and I think this explains why things go wrong so often during pregnancy. Of course, at first sight it's strange, my heart and my liver have been functioning very well for for 62 years, and yet during pregnancy, you have a natural process that only lasts for nine months, and yet many things go wrong during it. And I would argue that the reason why pregnancy doesn't work as smoothly as the normal functioning of the body is that in normal bodily functioning all the parts of the body are genetically identical to each other and working towards survival of that body, but in pregnancy, you have two different genetic individuals interacting with each other and natural selection can act at cross-purposes, there's a sort of politics going on, and we know that politics does not always lead to efficient outcomes."
With this sort of surgery, they wouldn't be cutting into the uterus (womb) itself when extracting it from the donor, but instead will cut around it to remove it, along with some very essential plumbing. The receiving mum will also be on industrial-strength immune suppressants anyway.
Where you DO have to worry about leaks and weak stitches is with said plumbing (uterine arteries and veins) -- they have to support virtual firehoses of blood through the duration of pregnancy, and their damage is one reason why a delivery can go south very, very quickly. Obstetric medicine is definitely a high-risk sport, which is why their malpractice insurance rates are head and shoulders above any other medical specialty. But I digress...
Why us and not other mammals? No idea.
Turns out, being the most intelligent apex comes with some gestational specialities.
You can also flip the perspective the fetus is trying to survive in a hostile environment designed to strangle it. If it isn't clawing for every ounce of food and air it will become a miscarriage. It must interface with a system built for millenia designed to kill anything that doesn't have its code.
In truth, it is the equilibrium that evolution has achieved. Placenta must account for the most vicious fetus, and fetus must account for most vicious placenta.
The immune system can't see DNA at all. It works by other methods.
That would be the gestational sac, no?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-29485996
A rare, congenital, condition.
The image shows very little technology, but to me, is the epitome of how life and progress can unite.
That it doesn't seem noteworthy to you that your best comparison is invoke Godwin's law on yourself.
Or the idea that the reason that the right wing suffered must have been because people were mistaking them for Nazis.
I’m not arguing that the state should forcibly implement this, which is usually the common (and legitimate) argument against this line of thinking.
Socially is another story which I'd be fine with or even encourage. Saying I'm "just interested in ideas" is a hell of a way to dismiss thinking about what's right and wrong for me personally to do, for others to do. Not all thought has to involve the damn government as the actor.
> People love to straw man this obvious issue, saying, “oh so you support forced sterilization?” No, I didn’t say that.
So what are you saying?
I believe people do plenty of immoral things but do not necessarily believe we ought to use that state violence to prevent or punish them. Adultery, for instance, is one of the more contemptible choices one can make, and yet goes unpunished by the state. Some jurisdictions don’t even consider it strongly in divorce proceedings.
I hear you loud and clear: you don't want to forcibly sterilize anybody. OK, good on you for that.
My personal take is that it’s a moral imperative for humans to eventually edit obviously-bad disorders out of the gene pool going forward, through CRISPR-style editing or just selecting sperm/eggs to exclude the known bad genes. We have to come up with a good definition of “disorder” that people can be happy with, but I don’t think it’s an impossible task to do so.
I think it’s a moral imperative precisely because we’re so good at medical intervention that we’re able to keep people with a variety of conditions and disorders alive and even procreating, when “naturally” they wouldn’t have been able to do so without advanced medicine. Because of this, such disorders become more and more common in the gene pool because they’re no longer being effectively selected against.
We ought to prevent the human race from being utterly dependent on advanced medicine for survival, is my point. And IMO the way to do that, is to make sure that if we’re using advanced medicine to allow people with a genetic disorder to live a healthy life and procreate, we ought to do the gene editing necessary to make sure the disorder itself is not passed on to the next generation. (Basically address the “root cause” as well as the symptoms.)
Why is "flagged" considered a super downvote? I flag spam, and that's pretty much it.
"At what point does it get silly?"
Yes! If some body modifications make someone more efficient at killing, raping, stealing, committing crimes we should all be against it. If it is just because it annoys some people's sense of nature, no.
But note how I phrased that: Being able to rewrite the DNA of killers etc. to make them smarter, in the absence of influencing developed adult brains, only makes their descendants (in the strictly genetic sense of the word) smarter.
At some point in this century, and probably sooner rather than later, we're going to be able to cost-effectively write arbitrary human-length genomes. Simply printing a custom genome will likely happen well before it becomes possible to safely rewrite live adult genomes, which is itself a different task from understanding, controlling, or safely re-activating in adults, the developmental pathways that lead to healthy growth within a brain for things as vague as "lust", "empathy", or "intelligence".
But to your previous question, "At what point does it get silly?": at some point, we're all made of atoms, and if we had a level of control over matter as in fictional narratives like The Culture or Star Trek, then (modulo weight changes) all your atoms can be rearranged to turn you into a copy of me, or anyone else on the planet, or any other species including fully customised not-found-in-nature varieties.
I'm reminded of a cover of a Monty Python song:
> Oh, I'm a lycanthrope and I'm okay, I romp all night and I sleep all day.
- http://web.archive.org/web/20080509070613/http://www.swampfo...
Silly is fine :)
I think it’s arrogant to claim you know what “nature” chose, if indeed it “chose” anything at all.
Is this because they're not connecting the transplanted uterus to the fallopian tubes or something? Or is there some other reason that it wouldn't be possible to conceive the "old-fashioned way" post-transplant?
Creating and freezing embryos otherwise seems like a very strange thing for a woman to have done who has no uterus, unless she was already considering surrogacy. Where was she expecting them to grow?
Requiring the embryos to be created before knowing whether the womb transplant would be possible or successful seems really odd to me.
In some jurisdictions the former could be illegal while the latter would be legal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaginal_transplantation#Labora...
(I don't know why this lab stopped performing this procedure though.)
Could someone born as a man have a transplanted womb and get pregnant through in-vitro fertilization, in theory? anyone here with more medical knowledge who can comment on how likely that is to work at some point in the future?
As you may imagine, she was not happy with such responses.
I am unaware of trans women having received this operation yet, but Lili Elbe died after the first uterine transplant nearly 100 years ago, before the Nazi regime destroyed trans medicine and eradicated contemporary trans existence. Given the global climate, I don't expect any trans recipients to be eager for publicity. It will happen, and soon.
Aside from this, the male pelvis isn't shaped to accommodate a womb, and males don't have the hormonal milieu to enable pregnancy.
The closest that researchers have come to having a male gestate a foetus was in rats. But they had to connect the bloodstream of the male rat to a pregnant female rat, where both were implanted with embryos at the same time. Even then, it worked less than 5% of the time.
why just trans? it would work on any male regardless of what they identify as if it were possible. No need for penis removal either, C-section would work.
First, male-identified people can be born biological female. It's an identity.
Second, the procedure doesn't exist for biological males to begin with right now, neovagina or not. A neovagina is physiologically not a biological female vagina to begin with anyway so I wouldn't help at all with the gestation. Birth can be done via C-Section.
No, since plenty of trans men have babies. All these considerations would be completely irrelevant.
It's strong evidence that the desire to birth child has nothing to do with gender identity, which latter will be pretty much pointless by the time science allows human fœtus gestation outside the human female body.
However, I fear the largest hurdle will be a political one, with so many nutjobs [2] so hell-bent on imposing their dogmatic definition of gender on everyone.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/health/2023/08/23/uterus-transplant...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/18/jk-rowling-har...
Citation needed
If you couldn't tell, that was a jab at your appeal to tradition.
Harmless divergence from nature: helping women have children.
People's perspectives give wildly different views on things.
Giving birth is already not a precondition of being a woman, as the category "infertile women" exist.
No one does a womb-check before granting women validity. It's always been a vibe thing and people who do not conform to the prescribed model of existence as a man or woman are constantly denied full privileges under the framework. It's not just trans women getting the short end of the stick here, it's everyone: men who do not embrace dominance culture or otherwise display "effeminacy" are denied true Man status, women who don't meet beauty standards or possess a submissive demeanor are slurred as bull-dykes or the dreaded transexual.
This isn't an issue with any real reasonable basis for it's opposition, it's a golem of pure hatred and disgust in a suit vs. people who want to live full, free lives.
editing to add: the first known uterine transplant was performed on Lili Elbe who received treatments through the Institute of Sexology in Germany. The Institute was famously destroyed by the Nazi regime. It's barely coincidental that fascism has risen again as medical science brings this technology to maturity. Trans women gave their lives for this medical miracle.
I saw all of that already. Some of it in this very thread, some of it on the defunct /r/GenderCritical: I remember someone proposing committing suicide by volcano to keep her uterus out of "male [sic] hands".
This "gotcha game" has become so tiresome.
Not that there's any amount of polite progress that won't cause insane public discourse when it involves gender.
Where we want to end up is with artificial wombs because that will ultimately give individuals much more control over their reproduction and will do away with the onerous physiological and psychological stresses that pregnancy puts on women.
An extra-uterine system to physiologically support the extreme premature lamb https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14194422
Is it a miracle I can go to JFK and fly through the air and be in Europe for dinner?
It’s a surgical procedure. It’s cool that it worked. We don’t need to invoke the supernatural here, especially given the oodles of hard work that went into this by very real and natural human beings.
At some point we should just assign credit where credit is due: thousands upon thousands of people working very hard for many decades to make the impossible possible.
Our modern world is amazing, but it’s not miraculous. It’s achievement, not supernatural.
For a comparison, check out what a 1-month supply of a biologic drug costs: https://www.goodrx.com/stelara
https://www.drugs.com/price-guide/pluvicto
prob also raising a child way expensier if you factor uni and such into it vs UK
But they tend not to cover fertility stuff.
“That’s ok, other people bear the enormous cost.”
Not really a win, that.
Uterus transplants are still experimental. The only ones I could find in the U.S. are in clinical trials and are being paid for by the institution to people accepted into the program, such as the one at John Hopkins.
There are not gynecologists (yet) charging $200,000 for uterus transplants in America.
I would like to reflect on the timing of this - the UK Supreme Court just ruled something about a woman is a “biological” definition - and I am willing to put a lot of money on many people on both sides of that contentious debate struggling with the idea that “someone born without a womb is a woman” and “hey we can transplant wombs now”
Thousands of scientists and medical practitioners have taken thousands of baby steps to get to this point. We should fund every single one of them - we never know where research will take us.
The woman in question is a woman because her sexual differentiation followed the female pathway. Just because in her case that pathway led to a DSD variant doesn’t undo the rest of her female development or make her a little bit less of a woman, or male, or a third sex.
The other three I've commonly seen are:
(1) as you suggest, developmental pathway — which tends to trip people up over androgen insensitivity, and is also why puberty blockers are part of the public debate
(2) chromosomes — which has the problem of 0.6-1.0% of the population doing something else besides the normal XX/XY
and (3) current external physical appearance — which tends to lead to confusion by both transvestites in public, and also in private by anyone who has had top surgery but not bottom surgery.
(also, you should just not talk about trans people as you display immense ignorance in a very short time, you clearly have a concept of trans bodies that is rooted in fascist propaganda: trans women on HRT develop breasts without surgery).
From what I remember, that word was common and acceptable when I was growing up in the 90s, and I don't remember any Nazis using it. Nor did anyone tell me that the word "transvestite" was derogatory or offensive, although if social mores have shifted then fine, I won't say it.
What did I miss?
I have heard of folks who claim the label “transveatite” for themselves. Others see it as derogatory.
Where I wrote above:
> current external physical appearance — which tends to lead to confusion by both transvestites in public
That wasn't a statement about being transgender. I was saying that people judge clothing, and are confused by that clothing. "Public" being about clothing, because there aren't many public places where you're going to see enough skin for anything else to cause confusion.
("vest" as in vestments, clothing).
> trans women on HRT develop breasts without surgery).
Transgender people go both directions, not only AMAB but also AFAB.
Re: your second point, a closer reading of the comments will show that this thread is discussing "women."
e: The far more interesting discussion is whether the revival of eugenics-era language is justifiable. This is hardly the first example on this site of arrogant commentators casually reviving language that came to be understood as hateful in the 20th century.
It's the primary term I grew up with in the UK specifically about what is also called cross-dressing.
It's also used by one of my favourite comedians, Suzy Eddie Izzard, as self-description ("executive transvestite") before she identified as transgender: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dress_to_Kill_(Eddie_Izzard)
> Re: your second point, a closer reading of the comments will show that this thread is discussing "women."
1) Quite a lot of transphobes focus entirely on women, thus ignoring how their own rules end up forcing trans men to end up in women's-only spaces.
2) I am informed that many trans women have implants before hormones. In fact, one woman I know openly discussed face surgery as part of her transition.
Also: cis women have breast surgery. I'm told most often as a reduction. Facebook, in its complete uselessness, has advertised the surgery to me along with dick pills.
The bill referenced makes no direct mention of womb, nor functioning. You're using "literally" a bit unfaithfully there.
from the law
> a "female" is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova,
“is developed to produce ova” is a statement about current capability. If they meant to include women with hysterectomies, they would have worded it differently, like “is or once was developed to produce ova;” if they meant to include women with non-functioning wombs, they would have written more broadly, like “is of the type that usually produces ova” or something.
It is somewhat similar to how men with vasectomy still produce sperm.
Are you including ovary removal in your definition of hysterectomy?
Or are you defining "ova production" as including fertilization/implantation?
For the last few fractions of a percent accuracy, a SRY cheek swab test is a simple non-invasive screening test that can flag individuals for further investigation. World Athletics have just implemented this test, stating it is “a highly accurate proxy for biological sex”.[1] A positive result in this screening test could be combined with a finger prick test for testosterone level to provide further information, and at this point we’re into methods of medical diagnosis of DSDs. About 1 in 5000 individuals will have a DSD, some of which are still unambiguously male or female (e.g. XXY Klinefelter syndrome), and some of which are almost unique individuals that defy categorization.
At this point, it is popular to seize on those rare individuals and declare “aha! So sex isn’t binary then! So it must be a spectrum!”, and while this is surely well-intentioned, it is scientifically illiterate.[2] I suspect part of the confusion is interpreting “binary” as a mathematical Boolean value (where exceptions cannot, by definition, exist) rather than as a scientific classification, where exceptions can and do exist and “prove the rule”.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269892...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/articles/cj91dr17d1no.am...
[2] https://richarddawkins.com/articles/article/race-is-a-spectr...
MRKH syndrome is a disorder of female sex development, and if you look at this from the perspective of developmental biology it's clear that anyone affected by this must be a woman. I feel it shouldn't be too hard an idea to struggle with.
That they have a working womb transplant technique is impressive from a medical technology point of view but I think not enough has been said about the ethics of this experimentation.
Personally I wouldn't risk exposing my baby to transplant anti-rejection drugs. We don't know how this may impact the short-term or long-term health of the baby.
The court is really saying that the lawmakers did not specify properly what they meant in certain cases and that they should probably modify those sections (they are carefully not to tell Parliament what to do), which can be done and does sometimes get done when such things crop up.
Yes, the act (as it should) protects people from discrimination based on gender reassignment, e.g. you can't fire someone for their gender identity or deny them from a service.
The act makes it illegal to discriminate against someone due to their "sex", but a portion of the act allowed for "single sex" spaces where there is reasonable grounds to have them, but the act (reasonably at the time) did not define what sex was.
A piece of Scottish legislation referred to "woman as defined by the Equality Act", but the Equality Act never said if it was referring to biological sex or gender identity, the Scottish government said it would include people with gender reassignment certificates, a "woman's rights" charity disagreed. Hence the court got involved and found the original intention was to refer to biological sex, which was confirmed by the politician that introduced the Equality Act (Harriet Harman).
- Lord Filkin, the Minister who introduced the Gender Recognition Bill in the House of Lords in 2003 (18th December)
All of the following are nearly possible today:
+ A man implanted with a womb giving birth.
+ A woman stealing genetic material and creating a baby, the gender of the second parent is irrelevant here.
+ A woman wanting an abortion, instead having the fetus removed and placed in an artificial womb under the care of the father.
And one that I was working on:
+ Farm animals grown with their brains shut off, used as compute substrate for biological neural networks, while their biological functions are controlled remotely.
I’m sorry, you were working on what? Where does one learn more about this concept?
One does not.
One builds the tools to run the experiments to discover the rules.
The closest are FinalSpark and CorticalLabs, but they both are only using in vitro neurons as the computational substrate.
Neuralink et al. are working in vivo, but they are only doing output and don't have any plans to do input, let alone to actively disrupt normal neural activity and take control of bodily processes.
If you're very interested feel free to drop me a line.
Here's another one for you, given how many people care about XX/XY as a distinction of gender: Humans have 46 chromosomes, but by this definition, about 0.6–1.0% of live births from human mothers are of individuals who aren't human.
Language is a tool we use to create categories, don't let language use you. Insisting that everything in reality must conform to the categories that language already has, is mistaking the map for the territory.
English: Times, German: Mal or Zeiten.
"Every time" is "jedes Mal", but "good times" is "gute Zeiten". "Three times four" uses "mal".
And every time a new thing gets invented, found, or imported, neologisms pop up, or words get borrowed from other cultures. In English, robins are said to have "red breasts", because the colour orange had not yet been coined when the bird needed a name, because the fruit after which the colour is named had not yet arrived.
People also argue about if "vegetarian hamburgers" is a sensible term, as if the "ham" implies meat, even though (1) the meat varieties usually use beef, and (2) it's named after the place Hamburg.
Before the development of hormonal and surgical solutions, the only thing trans people could do was change their clothes. At some point, the medical options are so capable that any given previous definition of gender becomes malleable. A womb implant is one such option.
I really don't.
As I say in such discussions, "you're only allowed to call them 'hamburgers' if they're from the Hamburg region, otherwise it's just a sparkling fried patty".
See also: https://xkcd.com/3075/
If you're still human if you're born without legs then clearly neither genetic or developmental traits determine someone's humanity.
So at what point do we call someone a woman born without a uterus? When a 'normal' pregnancy would have resulted in them having a uterus? When different genetics would have resulted in them having a uterus? Or when she herself complains that she lacks a uterus?
When a woman is born without a womb, the doctors should investigate and figure out why that is. Is something else missing? Could there be other issues? A diagnosis should be made.
No such investigation is necessary when a man is born without a womb.
What often happens is that a "supreme" court like this will file an opinion attempting to clarify the meaning as best they can, but it really requires a statutory amendment by the legislators to fix it. Often that is what happens next.
You're not allowed to be in the middle anymore.
People love to be "in the middle" and thus "reasonable".
Are you an extremist or a moderate? Because I can get along with a moderate person on the left, right, or anywhere in between. By the same token extremists regardless of stripe are unbearable.
about 1 in 2000 births have less than 4 limbs but i don't see anybody claiming its a spectrum.
Not intending to debate the ethics of abortion, but one of the reasons foetuses are aborted is due to disability, down syndrome being a notable example.
You made a claim, but without evidence. Iceland is a population, that demonstrates the contrary.
Not saying you're wrong, but the second sentence is suspect and it's not interesting to argue about why.
Here’s a poll of Americans that includes a question about aborting fetuses with Down Syndrome. 44% of pro-choice respondents oppose it. I’m not wrong and there’s no reason to find that sentence suspect. https://www.kofc.org/en/resources/communications/polls/maris...
> trans people
Those populations have very little to do with each other - if anything.
You can even mix and match with which parts are present vs absent. I know someone with an arm that stops just above the elbow but still has several (usable!) fingers extending from it. So no joint, but sorta-yes hand.
So I don't see 1 in 1500 people being oppressed by the court ruling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development
the humans with intersex conditions themselves object the term, as it tags them as sick, a "disease". their personal experience based political interventions have lead to the prohibition of cosmetic surgeries on genitals of minors, or forced hormonal sex assignment on minors, in several European countries that is. so they can decide on their own when they are old enough. that's all the personally affected humans ask for, for the next generation: let them be as they are and allow them to decide on their own.
Not really true. Some people maybe.
>Sex is binary
Sex is complicated. Traits cluster bimodally, but it would be reductive, scientifically inaccurate, to say it’s a simple binary.
>People with DSDs are female or male
That depends on how female and male are categorized. The line between in the trait cluster and outside of the trait cluster is arbitrary. So it depends where you draw that line.
There's not like 20% of humans with mammary glands and a scrotum, right? Or 10% with no reproductive organs. Or 15% with both sets.
The obvious flip side of 1 in 1500 is that 1499 out of 1500 are binary.
So there's not really a spectrum as most people would understand that word.
The spectrum of sex characteristics is a bimodal distribution with two peaks. and the vast majority of all humans fall close to one of the two peaks peaks. however, they indeed exist medically classified circumstances for bodily sexual expression that is not on one of the peaks but somewhere in between.
and the percentage of those not close to the peaks is heavily contested and varies between 1 in 15000 ( putting extremely high bars on "uh wen can't tell") to 17 in 1000 (counting for example a larger clit as a penis-y ambiguous thing)
bimodal distribution with distinct peaks and a low but non-zero density between the peaks.
Some people who are DSD take great pride in being non-binary.
People who are DSD have been documented for CENTURIES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex_people_in_history
But that's my whole point, "sex" a spectrum and it's one of the big lies perpetuated by people who insist everything was known and set in stone, when their bible was invented, despite never having microscopes or telescopes or even eyeglasses
Yes I know it's a spectrum, and all 'intelligent' people I know this (the spectrum is unevenly distributed with 2 peaks).
Of all the things in the world that people understand or misunderstand, why, to you, is this particular subject even an issue?
kindergarten level logic fails at physiological sex ambiguity.
and it fails even more so at gender identity issues.
I can tell you that in Czechia and former East Germany, two most atheist places in the Western world, the concept of sex as a spectrum isn't especially popular either. People can be somewhat socially conservative without believing in the bible.
no. sex, biological sex, is not binary.
I know that not every single human fits.
That does nor stop it being a binary, or that binary being a major fault line
This is a natural biological system, not a logical system. Cases that do not fit do not disprove the rule
I don't know why you think this is a conservative lie. It is not.
Would only have the sister's DNA if it was an ovary transplant.
Fun fact: fetal cells transmit back to the mother and can be spotted in virtually every organ afterwards - it's called "Fetomaternal cell microchimerism" [1].
It's not a far stretch to assume the transfer works also the other way around and you can detect maternal DNA in the fetus/child, but I'm not aware if there has been research around that.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357422...