Chimera Genetic Anomaly and infusion of Souls

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jaypeeto4
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
J

Jaypeeto4

Guest
cronaca.com/archives/001331.html

It is Catholic dogma that the soul is infused into the new human being at the instant of conception. We all know that.
But link to the site above regarding Chimeras.
This is when two fertilized eggs, two embryoes, fuse into one embryo resulting in the birth of one person with the DNA of two different people.
Problem is, they were originally TWO embryos, not one.
So, since the soul is infused at the instant of conception,
does one of the souls depart to be with the Lord when the embryos fuse into one, or does the resultant baby have two souls? Odd question, but I think a good one.
Jaypeeto4 (aka Jaypeeto3)
 
Fascinating article. I have no idea as to how to answer your question, but I look forward to the responses.
 
One child dies, is miscarried, in the fusion. That’s the simplest and most obvious answer, I think.

Peace and God bless!
 
Again interesting article, but I don’t have an answer on hand. Maybe (If no one answers soon) you could investigate the oldest known cases of this happening. If its been known for a while maybe one of the church fathers wrote something about it…even a brief note?

Catholig
 
I would doubt if the ECFs knew about it 1800 years ago.
It’s one embryo absorbing another, and that kind of knowledge wasn’t around back then.
I just wonder if :
God gave the two separate embryos one soul each.
If so, when the one embryo absorbs the other,
does one of the souls return to God so that the new
hybrid embryo has only one soul.
It’s been bugging me a little ever since I first
heard of this phenomenon.

God bless,
Jaypeeto4 (aka Jaypeeto3)
 
I think ‘conception’ is loosely defined. It doesn’t necessarily mean the instant of zygote formation. So the end of ‘conception’ could be, say, after a period of ten days after which all these anomalies would have occurred and only a single cell line could result. (I don’t know if 10 days is the right time, but there would be a ‘cut-off’ point after which these anomalies can no longer occur - whenever that time is, that could constitute the end of conception)

Another explanation is that they both contain the soul of the same individual (after all, God knows that a fusion will or won’t result). It’s not as though immaterial concepts like ‘souls’ are divisible anyway - so one full soul plus another full soul can still equal one full soul.
 
Ok, I’m going to go out on a limb and ask a stupid question: Can two souls exhist in the same body?
 
One child dies, is miscarried, in the fusion. That’s the simplest and most obvious answer, I think.
Click to expand...
That’s one option.

The other is that the two parts always shared one soul, and possibly the fact that there was only one Form shared between them is what “pulled” the two parts together in the first place.

That the “second half” was like a detached arm or something (not exactly) that was always meant to be “reattached” to the other half…except this time, it was the one soul which inclined the two to come together in the first place.

Of course, sometimes the second half probably does have a soul of it’s own (like with enveloped twins, where one little twin with a fully formed, though “parasitic,” body, lives inside the other indefinitely)
Can two souls exist in the same body?
Click to expand...
Depends what you mean by “body”.

Conjoined (“siamese”) Twins come to mind…they are ultimately one big connected mass of cells, and yet have two souls…so I think we metaphysically speak of “two bodies” (like they will have at the Ressurection…since they have two Forms). But obviously they can share organs and it can be hard to tell from a practical standpoint where one begins and the other ends physically.
 
I would say that just as the recipiant of a heart from another does not maintain the donors sould in the recipiants body, so someone with chimerism does not maintain their alternates soul in their body.

At a point in time (conception) there were two, one absorbed the others body, and in effect, killed it and took its organs. No intention here, just biological fact. So there is now one soul where there were two.

A lone Raven
 
You’ve all given me fascinating replies to think about,
and I thank you all very much.
I look forward to hearing more about this.
I wonder if the Holy See will ever make a declaration on this issue, since it is relatively newly-known.
God bless !!
Jaypeeto4 (aka Jaypeeto3)
 
Teajay,

Not to put a damper on inquiry, but I would be VERY careful about loosening the definition of “conception.” It will have great consequences concerning abortion.

Perhaps the two souls fuse, as two clouds can join in the sky? I am also speculating here, but I have never heard of any “law of conservation of souls.”
  • Liberian
 
No. Sorry, but that’s ridiculous. Souls can’t “fuse”. They are immortal, once created, a soul will maintain it’s individual existence for eternity.

The options are either that one dies, or they always had one soul from the start and were just two parts of the same body. But souls can’t fuse.
 
Catholig said:
Again interesting article, but I don’t have an answer on hand. Maybe (If no one answers soon) you could investigate the oldest known cases of this happening. If its been known for a while maybe one of the church fathers wrote something about it…even a brief note?

Catholig
Click to expand...
I don’t think the Church Fathers would have known about this. The only way to confirm a person is a chimera is to do a DNA test on the person (several in fact) to show that the person has two sets of DNA. So the phenomenon has probably existed unnoticed untill the past 30 years or so.
I have no answer to the conundrum, but I agree, chimeras are simply fascinating!
 
I agree with the comment above about “messing with the definition of conception” - it opens too many doors.

There’s actually a much bigger issue with chimeras than 2 human embryos fusing. There are such things as human-animal chimeras. These are beings with a combination of human and animal DNA. In other words, the chimera is NOT 100% human DNA.

The big question here is “Do such beings even have souls at all?”

At what point is something that looks and acts human not really a human if it has some percentage of animal DNA replacing human DNA?
 
Okay, I don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings,
but human-animal Chimeras ???
Are you certain you read the stories correctly ???
I can’t imagine such a thing happening, as I have always
been taught that humans and animals cannot reproduce together, quite apart from the appalling perversion of attempting to do so…

Jaypeeto4 (aka Jaypeeto3)

???
 
It’s not human-animal, it’s more like conjoined twins that are very conjoined. (They had an episode on CSI:Nevada about a Chimera once. That’s the first thing that came to mind when reading this thread.)

In the case of the show, the (who commited a crime) had one DNA, and certain body parts had another. So, that kind of brings up an interesting question -

Let’s say someone who’s a chimera marries, and has kids. Their reproductive organ belongs to their twin and not them. Who’s child it is, and what’s the status of the marriage?

Sounds like a riddle…

Also, if a person who’s a chimera is baptized, which twin gets baptized?
 
Jennifer_G said:
It’s not human-animal, it’s more like conjoined twins that are very conjoined. (They had an episode on CSI:Nevada about a Chimera once. That’s the first thing that came to mind when reading this thread.)

In the case of the show, the (who commited a crime) had one DNA, and certain body parts had another. So, that kind of brings up an interesting question -

Let’s say someone who’s a chimera marries, and has kids. Their reproductive organ belongs to their twin and not them. Who’s child it is, and what’s the status of the marriage?

Sounds like a riddle…

Also, if a person who’s a chimera is baptized, which twin gets baptized?
Click to expand...
There’s still only one person and soul in the chimera, no matter how you determine that the came about.

Remember, corpses have the same DNA as the living person who had the body, but they don’t have active souls and can’t be Baptized. A person with the DNA of their twin is really not much more than someone who got a VERY early organ transplant, a stem-cell level organ transplant 😉

Peace and God bless!
 
Jaypeeto4 said:
It is Catholic dogma that the soul is infused into the new human being at the instant of conception. We all know that.
Click to expand...
Actually, we don’t all know that. In fact, I don’t think that’s been defined at all. If you know otherwise, I would be most interested in a citation.

What the Church (and honest science) does teach is that human life begins at conception. Ensoulment is a question about which the Church has never formally proposed an answer, to the best of my knowledge. The closest to a formal answer seems to be St. Thomas Aquinas’ proposition that ensoulment happens at 40 days for a male child and 80 days for a female (based largely on Aristotelian metaphysics, which seems flawed under more advanced scientific knowledge). That said, I believe the precise point of ensoulment remains an open question. (It should be noted, however, that I favor the ensoulment-at-fertilization hypothesis.)

Before thinking about this much more, I HIGHLY recommend reading the following article: The First Fourteen Days of Human Life. If you do, you will know more about this question than 95% of the people who routinely argue about it. If you don’t, I sincerely doubt you can thoroughly address the issues involved. Chimeras are only one question among several - you might also have to think about monozygotic twinning before you come to your answer.

God Bless,
RyanL
 
Jaypeeto4 said:
Okay, I don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings,
but human-animal Chimeras ???
Are you certain you read the stories correctly ???
I can’t imagine such a thing happening, as I have always
been taught that humans and animals cannot reproduce together, quite apart from the appalling perversion of attempting to do so…

Jaypeeto4 (aka Jaypeeto3)

???
Click to expand...
The issue I raised was related to, but not the same as the human-human chimera. Perhaps I should have started a new thread, but this was my first post to this forum.

When most people think of the word chimera, they think of animal-animal hybrids. A human-human chimera is very unusual, but natural in the sense that it wasn’t created intentionally by humans and is part of God’s creation. So I’m confident that God has somehow worked out the soul part of it all even if we don’t understand it.

But human-animal chimeras actually create a being with an unknown moral status in terms of “soul, or not”.

Yes, human-animal chimeras are “in the works” - starting with animals who have some human DNA added. Scientists are determined to make humans more perfect than God did, and are looking at animal DNA to help them get there. There are many articles at this site:

nochimera.com/chimera_ethics.html

And this article (also linked to at the above site) is very good as well.

lifeissues.net/writers/sey/sey_02ethicschimeras.html
 
The soul isn’t “implanted” in the zygote at the moment of conception, is it? The soul is created by God and exists extra-physically, that is, supernaturally. I never thought it was contained in a physical entity, although it is supernaturally “anchored” or attached; the human person is necessarily whole, body and soul.

Unless I’m mistaken, there’s no law which says that God must create a soul with every conception (although in the interest of the dignity of life, and because we have no means of knowing otherwise, we should assume that body and soul exist from conception). As far as I know, scientists can create blastocysts, for all intents and purposes, and do all other manner of peculiar things without joining egg and sperm. I wouldn’t think that these creations have souls.

So, I think we just don’t know. The separate embryos might have two souls, which would mean that one would die; or, only one may have a soul, and the other may only be alive in the biological sense, entirely lacking soul. Is there anything theologically wrong with that?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top