ladajo wrote:What if you take a ball peen hammer to an attached testicle? Should that count as genocide?
I do hope you are joking. You don't strike me as the sort that would lack knowledge on basic reproductive biology.
A human is made up of borrowed matter arranged in accordance with the blueprint stored in their DNA. It is the unique pattern which is the valuable part. The matter has been here for ~14 billion years, and is generic, but the compressed file that is a human being is unique and is the product of a fusion between the cells of two other human beings.
You are old enough to remember when expensive programs (Such as Autocad) came on series of disks as one large compressed file.
It wasn't the media which it was stored on that made it valuable, it was the compressed information which you were paying for.
Human beings are exactly like that. They are created by the fusion of two chunks of code from different people and the process of decompression takes 9 months. The program is stored in molecular matter, and what makes it valuable is how it is arranged. Without the "program" arranging it just so, it's nothing but a bunch of chemicals, mostly carbon.
We are all evolved sentient computer programs stored in matter and running on the mainframe of the Universe.
We favor our children because they share our pattern.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —