First Contact

Ultrasound of twins at 6 weeks (not mine, fyi!)

Question of the week (for me) -- when do people have first contact with their children? I may have seen mine very early on, when I was only about 6 weeks pregnant. I saw two blobs on an ultrasound image, anyway. But was that them--Becky and Sam? 

One thing seems pretty clear--it's not until 20 weeks gestation (very roughly, and at the very least

Are atheist accommodationists hypocritical?

Jerry Coyne finds philosophers very, very, very vexing when they try to reconcile science and religion.  He suspects it's always "political"--

In my estimation, all atheist philosophers who try to reconcile religion
and science are doing so for political reasons—as are organizations
like the National Academy of Sciences and the National Center for
Science Education that engage in the same

A Puzzle About Twins

Suppose people start existing on the first day after conception--just suppose.  Here's an argument that seems to show that identical twins must be an exception.  Take Betty and Casey, who come into existence as my diagram depicts--


Jeff McMahan makes this argument--

[Betty and Casey] ... cannot both be identical with the original zygote for, given the transitivity of identity, that would imply

Progress Report

I've been working slowly on a book (well, so far a WORD file) about parenthood. I'm dealing with topics in the order in which people encounter them, so the first several chapters are about the reasons why we have children, whether there are good reasons not to have children, and how choosy we ought to be about the kind of children we have. I'm trying to delve into the most thorny puzzles about

Faith

Michael Kelly's article about his daughter's marriage in the NYT Style section yesterday was a thing of beauty--try reading it without crying!  He starts with the horror of his daughter's rape 10 years ago and ends with this, on her abiding faith--



Ten years ago, bleeding and alone in the field where she had been left
to die at 24, my daughter got up and stumbled to a house in the dead of

Dear NRA

Words can't really express how I feel about yesterday's massacre, considering that I have teenagers I routinely drop off at movie theaters, so I'll just pass on a letter that came into my possession. It's from an NRA fan by the name of I. Amanidiot.

***

Dear NRA,

Consider, please, my little Swiss Army knife.



The US Government forbids me to carry it onto an airplane. This really upsets me.

Aristotle on Parenthood

Here are some passages from Aristotle that I've been pondering (all from Nichomachean Ethics Book VIII, Chapter 12). Maybe you'd like to ponder too--

A parent is fond of his children because he regards them as something of himself; and children are fond of a parent because they regard themselves as coming from him.
The parent regards his children as his own more than the product regards the