How New Humans Are Made

It is not okay to call something a miracle without even trying to understand it. This is human developmental biology (human embryology, in terms of cells and molecules) for everyone curious enough to see it through, from the perspective of the business of becoming human — as individuals and as species; making new humans; how it happens (cells do it, ALL of it); and common variations of the process.

It cannot be made quite simple and be kept quite true, but we will move as far toward simple as we can without losing touch with sound evidence. Variations from the “normal” version of the process, particularly malformations and 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 the endings these observable differences at the beginnings can make.

In this book, when technical terminology is the only way, or the best way, to say what needs to be said, it is defined and explained — making the words a worthwhile part of what is here to be learned.

This book defines its own new field. We cannot claim to understand how anything [human] works [as human], with no effort at understanding the emergence of its form and functions. Old and new unanswered questions are waiting to be dug out from under old unquestioned answers about how becoming human unfolds. We will also address some popular and weighty, but deeply empty assertions about the circumstances and mechanisms of our beginnings and our ceaseless becoming. We will find fundamental questions from ‘the humanities’ unanswerable except from biology. Human developmental biology is a foundational discipline within the humanities.

Sample Chapter(s)
Foreword (75 KB)
Chapter 1: Introduction (106 KB)

• Human, by [Cellular & Developmental] Definition: Emergence: of Mind, of Self, of Soul, of Person
• Genetic Twin Studies of Schizophrenia: Mind/Brain Asymmetry, Multifactorial Inheritance and Epigenetic Variation
• Reviewing/Reciting The Orthodoxy
• On The Zygosity of Twins
• Most Twins are Not Twins
• Natural History and Epidemiology of Twins and Twinning
• The Chorion, the Amnion and the Vertebrate Body Plan
• Each of Us was Once a Single Cell … or Two: Meiosis, Gametogenesis, Syngamy, Embryogenesis …
• Getting to the Bottom of Creation's Best Trick: How Human Lives Begin
• Timing is Everything
• Twins and Handedness and [Illusions of] Mirror-Imaging
• Twins and Malformations
• Twins and Teeth and (the Realities of) Mirror-Imaging
• The Oddest of Couples: Boy-Girl Twins
• The Weinberg Tautology and The Lingering Perfume of Red Herring
• Twinning and Spontaneous Chimerism
• Finding the Right Answer is Much Easier: After Finding the Right Question
• Normal Embryogenesis of Left and Right, and Twins and Chimeras
• The Logic of DNA Genotyping and Forensic Implications of Chimerism