"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara." ~ Richard Dawkins.
I have unearthed two articles today that are worth your attention on a Saturday. The first is from 2003. In an article for Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens claims a right to his own two cents on the abortion debate: "I claim an absolute right to be interested in the condition of the human fetus because … well, I used to be one myself." And as Dawkins points out in his introduction to Unweaving the Rainbow, there is unlimited scope for the horizons of "pro-life" pamphleteers. Where do the boundaries lie? What limits should be enforced? Are they right in Oklahoma to force women to have an ultrasound scan before undergoing the already traumatic procedure? Linking everything together once more, of course, is religion. In America, where the Roe v. Wade debate raged forever and rages forevermore, religious grounding, religious philosophies and doctrines are the cornerstones for all arguments on such issues. Hitchens also points out that the feminist movement was started in the States, which surely holds some significance. My second article dwells on similar fields and meadows. Richard Powers writes in The Guardian about the million souls who will never exist, the trillions of possible genetic sequences - indeed, the sand grains of the Sahara - as he bravely commits to the unravelling and documenting of his own genetic sequence. Only a handful of individuals have undergone the rather expensive experiment, but all it takes is a wad of cash, a few vials of blood and a sturdy stomach. How different would I be if that was there and this wasn't here? Do I have a susceptibility for Diabetes, cancer, heart disease? Will I develop schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, Huntington's? I struggle to articulate the many thoughts that these articles have amassed, yet I feel the need to throw them out there. To all the two-thirds of America who don't "believe" in the Law of Evolution, who claim they can't accept that we "descended from Apes" (not that we share a common ancestor with Apes anyway, rather from Chimpanzees), remember that even a 99.98% likeness still embodies tens of millions of genetic differences. Powers - "If a standard 250-page book comprises 500,000 printing characters, you'd need 12,000 books to publish an individual genome."
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