When Life Began

In a recent rant, regarding abortion, I closed my essay with a statement that life began more than 2 billion years ago. I want to take a moment to expound on what I meant by that; a statement that may appear to be, on the surface, a non-sequitur. What did I mean?

Sometimes, the most complex questions have the simplest answers, once you reframe your way of thinking. The question here, pondered by those who debate the ethics of abortion, is when does (a) life begin? This is a crucial question to some who regard abortion as murder.

Let’s take a closer look at the process of birth. The ovum, a living cell, merges with a spermatozoon, another living cell, to produce the embryo, yet another living, group, of cells. Typically, thinkers focus on when does the embryo become alive? But as we have just seen, the two things that went into making the embryo themselves were alive to start with! Human bodies created these cells, which were in turn made the same way, cell to embryo, in a process that stretches back millennia. My parents begot me and their parents begot them, etc.

This question, when does life begin, is similar to the question, which came first the chicken or the egg? Well, the EGG of course, because the egg as an evolutionary “system” predates the existence of chickens; even dinosaurs laid eggs long before there were chickens.

When you step back from the question and remove the limitations that come from our time based sense of the world as human beings, you see that life, obviously, began some time in the past, scientists estimate that this was about 2 billion years ago. The cells and embryos are merely the carriers of this energy we call life, like a radio carries the radio waves which exist ambiently. If you shut off the radio, the radio waves still exist, independent of the machine and life exists independent of these vessels we call our bodies.

Therefore, the question of "when does life begin" itself is a non-sequtur because life has already begun and anyone one individual persons "life" is a continuation of the process which is life.