Biologists, even those who consider themselves very pro-choice,
disagree.
- 2,899 American adults were surveyed and asked to select the group most qualified to answer the question of when a human’s life begins. The majority selected biologists (81%).
- A sample of 5,502 biologists from 1,058 academic institutions assessed statements representing the biological view ‘a human’s life begins at fertilization’.
- Each of the three statements representing that view was affirmed by a consensus of biologists (75-91%). The participants were separated into 60 groups and each statement was affirmed by a consensus of each group, including biologists that identified as very pro-choice (69-90%), very pro-life (92-97%), very liberal (70-91%), very conservative (94-96%), strong Democrats (74-91%), and strong Republicans (89-94%). Overall, 95% of all biologists affirmed the biological view that a human's life begins at fertilization (5212 out of 5502).
Hahahahahahahaha. For someone who claims to harbor "above average" intelligence, why did you choose to not read or scrutinize the pseudo-manuscript you posted? If I was going to post something, I would make sure I read it and thought about the contents before posting something that borders on academic fraud.
First of all, you do realize that "paper" has not been peer reviewed, correct? There's many reasons why it hasn't past muster and been published in an academic journal, even the abstract is fraudulent. How did Steven Jacobs come up with 95% that you purposefully placed in bold? Did you actually read and understand what he means by 95%? Let me break it down, because I read it. He made a composite outcome. He
combined the responses of several questions of his "survey" to obtain 95%. What were the questions he included in his composite outcome?
Q1: "The end product of mammalian fertilization is a fertilized egg (‘zygote’), a new mammalian organism in the first stage of its species’ life cycle with its species’ genome "
Q2: “The development of a mammal begins with fertilization, a process by which the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote.”
95% of biologists did not affirm that "a human's life begins at fertilization." A significant proportion of that 95% value agreed with the idea that a new mammalian organism is created at fertilization. Nowhere in those two questions does the words human life appear, nor the phrasing of "a human's life begins at fertilization." That's obvious reason #1 why this junk survey has never achieved publication, it is a downright false statement he makes in his abstract.
Furthermore, how did he generate his survey? His methodology is sparse, incomplete, and simply doesn't make any sense. He claims that he magically contacted "62,469" biologists through email. No, he didn't have a listserv or mass email list to send it out to. He seriously claims that he looked up "biologists" on academic websites and emailed them. Am I really to believe he sat at his computer and emailed each one? If I were to assume it takes 1 minute to look up each "biologist," it would take him over 43 days of working 24-hours non-stop to achieve that number. Are you really that gullible? He also claims to have solicited "post-docs" from faculty pages. Post-docs are not faculty, and most don't even have a separate page on the websites of different academic institutions. So how did he solicit contact information from this group? It makes zero logistical sense.
How does he define a "biologist?" Does a virologist qualify? How about a bacteriologist? Structural biologist? Which one's did he select? He can't claim he emailed a bunch of experts in the field if he doesn't even know what area of biology they are experts in. His use of the term "biologist" is just trying to put lipstick on a pig, it is a buzz term trying to make it sound like he contacted experts in the field. But again, there's a reason why he doesn't include such key points in his methodology, it is clearly junk science. Look at his response rate, 12%. That is an utterly dreadful response rate, as many social science surveys of good academic rigor achieve 30-60% response rates. Look at the rest of his methodology. He claims he asked biology questions to solicit the expertise of the subjects, but nowhere does he include the data to validate his survey. Why did he refuse to include that validation data? Look at the author list. There is only one person willing to slap their name on this write-up, just "Steven Andrew Jacobs." It is almost unheard of for a PhD candidate to try to publish something in academia without having his degree mentor(s) as co-authors. There's a reason nobody else wanted authorship of his low-quality efforts, right from the onset from his abstract, one can tell it is fraudulent data.
Its pretty clear his write-up is garbage and everything is indicative of bad science. So why did you trust those results when you didn't even bother to read his inept and/or made-up attempt to describe biologists' views?
Facebook
Twitter