 But person essentialism is controversial. Combined with a Lockean account of personhood, it implies that you could never have been an embryo: at best you may have come into being when the embryo that gave rise to you developed certain mental capacities. Nor could you come to be a human vegetable. For that matter, it rules out our being biological organisms, since no organism is a person essentially: every human organism starts out as an embryo and may end up in a vegetative state. It rules out both animalism and the brute-physical view described in the next section.