Ptah,

I don't want to get involved in an elaborate meta-discussion about who said/meant what, but in case you're interested, your conclusion:

The question revolves around whether he made an honest mistake of interpretation of what I said, or tried to twist what I said into something else for the express purpose of creating a straw man upon which to argue Reducto ad adsurdum. My conclusion, given the care I've tried to be clear, was that he was attempting the latter.

was wrong.

Your "argument" was:

You scratch your arse.

NOW you scratch your boss's wife's arse.

Moral: the difference is only DNA.

By this I thought you were saying that these two actions, which yield radically different social repercussions, were different entirely because the skin cells under his fingernails would have different DNA after these actions. I was led to this conclusion, partly because you have asserted that the time of conception was a reasonable demarcation point largely because that's when the cells contain a full complement of DNA.

I changed the scenario, knowingly, to identical twins to show that it is NOT the DNA that makes the difference, but that in fact two people have completely separate identities independently of their DNA makeup. A small change to your scenario illustrates how wrong this approach of over-emphasizing the DNA is. I was not trying to imply that my scenario was yours. I was trying to imply that yours, as I understood it, proved nothing interesting, and that DNA does not constitute personhood, but, rather, minds do.

I also was not trying to characterize your position as saying that his boss's wife was under his fingernails, just that the DNA difference is somehow vital to this scenario rather than the identity of the scratchee. I was saying that the DNA and the identity of the scratchee are different things, and used the identical twins to show that.

If I have misunderstood your argument, perhaps you could state it more explicitly so that it would be clearer to me and, perhaps, others.