system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is the question "where does life begin" a question of biology or epistemology?

As the title says. Can the question "where does life begin" be proven through biological study and observation, or will the conversation always boil down to what is considered to be alive between a different perspectives that hold different standards to what is "alive" and "dead"?
gpt
From a biology perspective the "where does life begin?" question is completely off base. This is because the sperm and the egg, which combined to form the zygote, were both alive long before conception. The egg has likely been alive since the women it belongs to was in her mother's womb. The sperm has been alive for months to years depending on the ejaculatory habits of the man it came from. In either case, the act of conception is not a situation where we have gone from 0 life to 1 life. On the biological account, we have gone from 2 lives to 1 life.

Perhaps you want to say we're not interested in life, but human life. I'd with you that this is stepping in the right direction, but biology still isn't much help to you. If by human life, you mean human cells, then the sperm, the egg, and the fertilized zygote all constitute human cells. As do skin cells which we lose thousands of every day. This is not so privileged a category to consider it's death a tragedy. So what you're looking isn't whether something that is a human cell, so much as when a certain combination of human cells can be considered a human life. This is where biology can no longer help you. You've now left the realm of science and entered the realm of philosophy. To transition to philosophical terms, what you're actually asking is when personhood begins. Again, this is not a question biology can answer (at least not without philosophical criteria directing it).

So the answer to your question is that biology can answer when life begin, in the most boring and useless way that contributes nothing to the abortion debate. The kind of "life" the abortion debate is interested in is a completely different definition than biology uses.