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Semi-Identical Twins Discovered
daftna writes in with a story from Nature about a pair of twins who are neither identical nor fraternal: they are semi-identical. Researchers discovered twins who share all of their mother's DNA but only half of their father's. Both children are chimeras — their cells are not genetically uniform, but include a mix of genes from two separate sperm cells that fertilized a single egg. This is, apparently, not as rare as one might think; but the resulting fetus is rarely viable. This report marks the first known incidence of two half-identical twins resulting from a double fertilization.
And to make it even more fun, think this: they later had to invent an explanation for exactly this kind of thing, namely the succubi and incubi. Virgin virtuous girls (yeah right) were supposedly impregnated by incubi. You don't invent a whole explanation for something that never happened ever since. So basically they knew it happened more than once, and in fact it happened again and again.
"Virgin birth" is actually a better excuse than incubi, if you can convince people of it:
Mary: Hey Joe, I'm pregnant!
Joseph: How can you tell?
Mary: It's pretty obvious, I'm starting to show.
Joseph: Uh oh! We're not married yet and they stone adulterers you know. We'd better get married right away!
Mary: That's great, but it's kinda late in the game here. How are we going to explain it?
Joseph: Hmmmm.. Let's see... Uh... How about, "incubi."
Mary: Not so good, then they'll be thinking the kid was fathered by a demon. Maybe not such a good idea.
Joseph: Well what then?
Mary: Uh.... well, ... hey, I know-- "virgin birth." That's it, that's the ticket...