“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Prenatal Human vs. Mother's Body

This makes it quite clear (thanks Cliff!).

In other words, wombs are not teleological and neither are zygotes and neonates in those wombs.

Death to teleology!

My uncle did all this incredible research on the placenta. It turns out there's a retrovirus called ERV-3 that sits in your DNA. It probably codes for immunosuppressive properties of the placental barrier.

In other words you are reading this sentence because a virus in your mom's genes caused her not to abort you spontaneously.

There's a full discussion of it in The Ecological Thought. This is the kind of thing that gets into my work a lot.

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