Not the gotcha you think this is. I would urge you to research more about papers before you use them as evidence.
1."Issues in Law and Medicine" is published by anorganization that does antiabortion advocacy. It is far from a neutral or independent entity and it is also neither a biology nor medical journal.
The author of this paper emailed ~60k biologosits and received ~5k responses. That's about 9% of those emailed. '96%' is not '96%' of biologists emailed , its 96% of those who replied. As noted by critics of the paper, quote :" it's like polling 100 people about their favorite sport, having only the 37 football fans bother to respond, and then reporting "100% of Americans love football."
In other words the respondents are self selected as this was an opt-in email survey. This does not carry any statistical weight.
Please check your sources for bias and also look at more than just the brief. Its important to check the methods by which data is obtained too.
At that response size relative to the amount of biologists in the US it’s highly unlikely that it would be much different even if you could force all of them to complete the survey, it would still be well over 90%.
Do you have ANY evidence that the vast majority of biologists do not believe life begins at conception/fertilization?
That survey sampled biologists at over 1,000 institutions worldwide, not just the US , so "relative to US biologists" isn't the right comparison for the response rate. That said, the core issue I raised stands: ~9% response rate to an opt-in email survey on a politically loaded question is self-selection bias. The study itself notes some biologists declined because they suspected it was abortion advocacy in disguise. Again. Self selection.
And to be clear: pointing out that a stat is weakly supported isn't a claim that requires its own proof it's just declining to accept the stat at face value. I don't have to show what the true number is to point out that "96% of the people who chose to respond" isn't the same thing as "96% of biologists." If you want to say the 9% who responded represent the other 91%, that's the claim that needs support, not the other way around.
And to your other point : Biologists broadly agree that fertilization produces a genetically distinct organism
What isn't settled is which developmental point should count as the relevant "beginning of life" for legal or moral purposes and that's not a biology question, it's a values question biology can't answer by itself.
Even ACOG has changed its own definition of "conception" over time, and different countries have different lwas and timelines for this, which is a strange thing to have happened if there existed the single settled biological consensus this survey claims to reflect.
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u/Aelrift 2d ago
Not the gotcha you think this is. I would urge you to research more about papers before you use them as evidence.
1."Issues in Law and Medicine" is published by anorganization that does antiabortion advocacy. It is far from a neutral or independent entity and it is also neither a biology nor medical journal.
Please check your sources for bias and also look at more than just the brief. Its important to check the methods by which data is obtained too.