{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02040816326530612, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.8584905660377355, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A Further Postscript to Mark Johnson

The exchanges between Mark Johnson and me can be characterized, I think, as analogous to the debate about whether a glass is half empty or half full. Johnson focuses on preimplantation as "an organized body of heterogeneous parts, influencing, and influenced by, each other, which works to preserve its existence and enhance its ability to inter­ act with its environment." All things being equal, this is correct and what happens in the normal course of embryonic development. My perspective is that all things are not always equal (as he himself notes in the case of cloning). Given both the biological possibility of twinning and the laboratory possibilities following in vitro fertilization, we need to rethink what moral claims we make about the early embryo. Part of our disagreements stems, I think, from our different perspectives: his focusing on normal embryogenesis and my focusing on the exceptions. However, I also make the further claim that the fact of the exceptions qualifies some of the moral claims made even during normal embryogenesis. Let me begin by acknowledging that Johnson is correct in noting that I mistakenly attribute totipotency to the preimplantation embryo as a whole. His comment that this capacity is predicated only of the cells and not the whole organism is correct. But, having said that, even though the preimplantation embryo is an organized entity with a te­ leology built into its genetic program, the fact of the "regulative devel­ opment" that he highlights also has important moral implications. Because of the totipotentiality of the cells during this early process of development, they are able to compensate for an error in another cell or to provide DNA for a missing cell, as he correctly notes. This is an important datum because it shows that in the normal process of em-