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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.
Chimerism is also a source of the exceedingly rare brindle coat pattern in horses. In such cases the different color hairs will have different DNA. In one case this caused two consecutive DNA sample sent to a lab for pedigree verification to return negative parentage for both the sire and dam, even though the owner had personally witnessed both the fertilization and the birth and hence knew for sure who the foal's parents were. DNA from the stallion's blood samples also showed no evidence of a Y chromosome.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
There's actually an interesting story, almost the flip side of this rare case in humans, running now in the New York Times about marmosets, in which a form of chimerism is quite widespread:
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
According to my anatomy textbook, after the spem digests its way through the zona pellucida:
It just hasn't happened in humans yet.
. stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6196225
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Intersex is not the same thing as a hermaphrodite. All hermaphrodites are intersex, but the vast majority of intersex people are not hermaphrodites. To be a human hermaphrodite, you have to have ovarian and testicular tissue in the same person. Most people who are intersex have only ovarian OR testicular tissue. Instead of having both types of gonads there is some problem with sexual development in the womb that results in a person with physical characteristics somewhere on the spectrum between the poles of male and female bodies. (Hence the newer term for intersex conditions: DSD or disorder of sex development.)
More importantly, if you call a person who is intersex a hermaphrodite many will likely be quite unhappy with you. Its akin to calling a Native American an 'Indian' - not only generally disliked by the people you are labeling but also factually incorrect because of a misunderstanding of what the term means (or on what continent you are located.)
Nick
Are you calling the virgin Mary a hermaphrodite?! Blasphemy!
As we probably all know 'virgin' was indisputably a mistranslation; the Hebrew for 'young woman' (almah) was translated into the Greek for 'virgin' (parthenos). I wonder why we all still refer to her as the virgin Mary, now that we know she wasn't (necessarily, to be absolutely pedantic) a virgin.
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No, "virgin" was not "indisputably" a mistranslation. And it is most certain that your "young woman" is a poor translation--to my mind, worse than "virgin".
The issue is not with the New Testament; there is no question that Mary is reported to have been a virgin in the New Testament. The issue originates with the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced by Jews before the time of Christ, and it has to do with the translation of Isaiah 7:14, an ostensibly Messianic prophecy. (The Septuagint was the translation used by New Testament writers.) It translates the Hebrew "almah" with the Greek "parthenos". Parthenos almost always means "virgin", while almah has a slightly different but overlapping semantic range. It's closer to "maid, unmarried girl, young woman of marriageable age". (Your "young woman" leaves out the unmarried/of marriable age implications.) Culturally speaking, an almah most likely would be a virgin--that would be the strong expectation, and it's enough to make "virgin" a connotation of "almah". While parthenos is not a precise translation, it is not a mistranslation. At the very least, not indisputably so. My goodness, man, just read the Wikipedia entry on almah and follow the references! This is not obscure information.
Sure, if you limit the meaning of "almah" to "young woman", it makes for a better game of "Hee hee, look at the silly Christians," but if you're interested in honest scholarship, you'll have to open your mind a bit.