How New Humans Are Made: Cells And Embryos, Twins And Chimeras, Left And Right, Mind/self/soul, Sex, And Schizophrenia

It is not okay to call something a miracle without even trying to understand it. This is human developmental biology for everyone, in perspective - the business of becoming human, as individuals and as species; making new humans; how it really happens (cells do it, all of it); and common variations on the themes. In this book, all avoidable jargon is avoided; what cannot be avoided is defined and explained. It cannot be made simple and still be kept true, but the author moves it as far toward simple as possible, without writing anything that cannot be backed up with ample sound evidence.Variations from the simplest version of the process, such as twinning and chimerism, figure prominently in the story because there is no better way to learn about the usual than to study the unusual and see what differences in outcome the observable differences in input make. This book defines its own new field - (human) developmental biology as a basic discipline within the humanities - while simultaneously answering both century-old hardcore cell biology questions such as those about how twinning and chimerism and the anomalies associated with these phenomena happen, and how these variations relate to the usual process, and also anti-scientific pseudo-biological assertions about when and how human life begins.