3 ms·
Sure, blame the biologists instead of the religious goofballs who think that something becomes human at the instant of gametic fusion.
by onychomys 4y ago
Sure, blame the biologists instead of the religious goofballs who think that something becomes human at the instant of gametic fusion.
- mjh2539 4y agoI mean it's got to be something; if it's not (a) human, then what could it possibly be?
- onychomys 4y agoIt's definitely NOT human. For the first day or two, all cellular processes (basic cell metabolism, protein synthesis, that sort of thing) are controlled by extranuclear DNA that comes only from the egg. So instead of having a chromosome number of 2N=46 like all the somatic cells in your body, the embryo is functionally haploid. While that's going on in the cytoplasm, the nucleus is a real mess. Sometimes it's 1N, sometimes 2N, sometimes even 4N! If we accept that humans are a species because of our DNA, then there's just no way you could ever call that embryo human in the first 36ish hours post-fertilization. I don't know quite what you'd call it, but it's definitely not that.