Here is a collection of videos of veterans being greeted by their dogs when they arrive at home after months overseas. Some of these dogs get crazy excited!

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/40324

And just in case you don't care much about videos of dogs, the last video is a montage of soldiers surprising their kids at school after being overseas, they are all very moving.

It's often claimed that life begins at conception.

To begin with, what does this mean? Surely the pro-lifer does not wish to deny that the sperm cell and the egg cell are alive. Rather, what's typically meant is that human life, the existence of a person in the sense of a unique individual with a full-fledged moral right to life, begins at conception.

In other words, this sort of pro-lifer literally beliefs that a single-celled zygote is a unique person in the very fullest sense of the term.

 

How plausible is this view? Not very, especially if you consider a couple of very ordinary sorts of events that sometimes occur in the reproductive process. One is the familiar event of monozygotic twinning, when two embryos are developed from a single zygote.



If it is literally true that a unique person was formed at the very moment of conception, then what are we to say about the splitting of the embryo into twins? Was Steve destroyed and do we now have two brand new persons? Does one of the twins get a unique privileged claim to being the person Steve? Does the person Steve now somehow occupy two bodies? There is no apparent way to make sense of it, because what we ordinarily mean by a person is not the sort of entity that can split in two.

Perhaps even worse for the view that personhood begins at the moment conception is the formation of a tetragametic chimera. This is when two distinct embryos (fraternal twins) merge together very early in development (but well after the point of conception) to form an individual with some cells from one genome and some cells from the other.



Now what are we to say? Is the resulting person Steve? Or has Steve been destroyed and is the resulting person Dave? Or are there now somehow two distinct persons living inside of a single body? If so, then I guess we have to say that killing the resulting embryo is really a double-homicide. Again, there is no apparent way to make sense of it, because what we ordinarily mean by a person is not the sort of entity that can fuse with another person to form a single individual.

So there you have it - a couple of very ordinary events that occur in human reproduction all of the time that give us very compelling reason to think that the zygote is not the sort of thing we should call a person (in the fullest moral sense of the term).

What do you think - is the zygote a person? If so, how do you handle twins and chimeras? If not, when do you think personhood begins?

Then stare at more breasts.

At least, that's what this study says. Apparently staring at breasts for a few minutes a day can cut the risk of heart disease and stroke in half for men (Well, presumably this only works for straight men. And probably lesbians too. Or bisexuals of any gender. Anyway...).

Of course you could get the same results from regular old cardiovascular exercise. But which are you more likely to do consistently, jog or look at boobies?

So fellas, here's to your health!



p.s. - rec this post, you just may save a life! ;)

*edit*

Good news: this post just got featured on Mancouch.

Bad news: Someone there revealed that according to Snopes, this study is a hoax. Bummer.