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Scientists Discover Sawfish Escape Extinction Through "Virgin Births"
An anonymous reader writes: The first known virgin births in smalltooth sawfish have been documented in the wild. Researchers from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission used DNA to show that three percent of a Florida sawfish population was created by female-only reproduction. Dr Warren Booth, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tulsa, who previously discovered an instance of parthenogenesis in snakes, said: "This is basically a very extreme form of inbreeding. Most people think of inbreeding as bad, but it could be helpful in purging deleterious mutations from a population." The findings were published in the journal Current Biology.
keep this away from the 4chan crowd
Life, uh, finds a way.
Sawfish must be a lot smarter than humans since they didn't form a nonsensical religion around it.
The human gods have forsaken us! Long live C'thulhu and His Sawtoothed Messiah!
I read that headline as "Scientists Discover Swedish Escape Extinction Through 'Virgin Births'" and thought I was about to read something truly interesting about pre-historic Nordic humans surviving during the Ice Age.
It's hard to find a Lisp programmer that's NOT a virgin...
#DeleteChrome
Except to those in Kentucky & Arkansas.
From TFA summary:
Dr Warren Booth, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tulsa, who previously discovered an instance of parthenogenesis in snakes, said: "This is basically a very extreme form of inbreeding. Most people think of inbreeding as bad, but it could be helpful in purging deleterious mutations from a population."
Most people think of inbreeding as bad, because it almost always is bad. Inbreeding depression is a very well documented, and well understood, phenomenon that can increase the extinction risk of critically endangered species. The idea that inbreeding can somehow be "helpful in purging deleterious mutations" has been discussed before, but a recent study found that even if small (e.g., endangered) populations are actively managed to control both inbreeding and outbreeding, the negative effects of inbreeding depression generally outweigh the benefits of removing harmful alleles. And that is a best case scenario, with reproduction carefully controlled to produce an optimal genetic outcome, which obviously does not happen naturally.
For these sawfish, asexual reproduction is most likely a desperation strategy used when the population has gotten so small that it is difficult or impossible to find mates. It is extremely unlikely that it will somehow improve the population's genetic fitness; more likely, it will lead to further decreases in genetic diversity and a corresponding loss of overall fitness.
Is the term used when not writing clickbait headlines
Yes, virgin birth... which in biblical times, in that area of the world, meant that the woman was a virgin when she MARRIED.
You don't need to play semantic games. The hymen is not a seal, it has an opening. Sperm could get in without sexual penetration. So pregnancy would be possible. Very remote and unlikely but possible.
Hopefully the European Royals don't find out how to do this or it'd cause all sorts of problems.
And this is exactly why I don't enjoy being around some atheists. Just the same old proselytism, and vitriolic attacks on religion started by some interesting nature fact. You are just on the opposite part of the fundamentalist scale, with both being bat-shit crazy. You must be the soul of the party wherever you go....
Well, yeah. The religious and the atheists are quite similar. In the absence of evidence they both draw a conclusion, one god exists, the other god does not exist. They both have articles of faith, merely opposite articles of faith. Agnostics are far easier to be around. They are more like: there's no evidence one way or the other, it can't be proven, why don't we talk about something more useful.
While correct, the poster i was replying to somehow has their mind so firmly entrenched in dogma, that the mere mention of "virgin birth" puts him into pure religious bullshit mode. Christianity has created the "virgin birth" myth of God impregnating Mary without banging her, while the actual meaning co-opted from Jewish religious "laws" meant "a virgin at the time of marriage." In all reality, Joeseph musta been one seriously gullible idiot... only way Mary's "God did it" got past her banging and knocked up by the UPS delivery guy on the sly; most gullible EVER.
No game of semantics, just actually responding to a specific post. As for what you said, yes, that is correct, it can happen.... still doesn't mean God's the baby-daddy sans a good banging happening.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I'm reminded of writers who called Snowden a coward for not facing trial in the US. I'm just glad he did what he did, courageously or not. But now I have the "Sir Robin's minstrals" song stuck in my head:
Brave Sir Robin ran away.
("No!")
Bravely ran away away.
("I didn't!")
When danger reared it's ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
("no!")
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
("I didn't!")
And gallantly he chickened out.
****Bravely**** taking ("I never did!") to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat.
("all lies!")
Bravest of the braaaave, Sir Robin!
("I never!")
What's A "Sawfish Escape Extinction"? And When Will You Change Your Stupid All Caps Headlines To Something Readable?
Joeseph musta been one seriously gullible idiot...
every novel has one. the earliest record in jesus' life which is historically accepted is that he was baptized, some few years before death. everything before that is just gospell, brought up almost a century after the facts to give the emerging new cult some proper mythical background. regardless of what the usual meaning of 'virgin' was at the time, the gospells actually meant 'conceived without bang' because that's the dogma they explicitly established, that he was the son of god blablabla. yes, people was gullible at the time ... oh, wait!
didn't you watch brian's life, you blasphemous clod??
About 1% of human pregnancies are attributed to (self reported) virgins.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/virgin-births-claimed-by-1-percent-of-us-moms-study/
Jesus was a sword fish.
Was a good friend of mine...
Agnostics are actually worse to be around when attempting to have a religious debate, as the superiority complex which comes with "anything is possible" is utterly infuriating to debate. Negative/weak/soft atheism is fine: "you have no evidence you can show me which supports your religious theory, despite searching for it in most of the predicted ways, so it probably isn't true" is a fairly reasonable argument to make. "You have no evidence for your religion, despite searching for it, but it could totally still be true" is akin to "you have no evidence that homeopathy works, despite searching for it, but it could still totally be true". Sure, it might be true, but that's a ridiculously banal position to take in an argument: "I win because I don't need to assert anything".
Yes, the Truth is incredibly infuriating and inconvenient to many people. It would seem that you are more interested in arguing than in trying to actually find the truth, even if the Truth is that you don't know the answer, especially if that is the Truth.
A true Agnostic, vs the lazy kind that you seem to classify us all as, has consciously come to terms with the truth of the unknown in a way most people can't deal with. People are so desperate to "know" whats going on that they will quickly fill their world model with many convenient non-truths in order to FEEL like they know whats going on, it brings them peace to believe they know.
A true Agnostic finds peace in the actual Truth instead, and one of the most important truths is knowing when you do not know something. For instance; I don't know if there is a "God" or even what that word really means, nor do I know if there is a flying spaghetti monster. As such I don't put belief in them any more than I put belief in the divinity of a Golden Hamster God statue I make myself. I merely expect that if such a thing/being exists and wishes for me to believe something about it then it will need to present itself and make it's case known and provide evidence. An old book cobbled together from various primitive seeming sources and organized by a political group of humans a couple thousand years ago just doesn't make the grade in this regard.
In other words; I don't need to actively Dis-believe something in order to not have belief in it. Atheists will often claim that they feel the same way, but their own words quickly disprove that. I am intimately familiar with how dogma and religious systems work and I recognize these things in Atheism quite easily. It is an understandable knee-jerk reaction to religion, but a knee-jerk reaction nonetheless.
> In the absence of evidence they both draw a conclusion, one god exists,
In the absence of evidence, I claim that giant sea monkeys take my dead mother dancing every night, but they carefully sweep up the squishy dead bits and put them back in her grave.
See, you have no evidence against that, so it could be as true as resurrection after crucifixion and stopping the Earth's rotation for tribal warfare reasons, and a just god demanding child sacrifice and genocide for and by their chosen people.
Finally! Someone else who knows the squishy truth of the Giant Sea-monkeys! Your mother is truly blessed.
Looks like I will have to replace my Jesus fish with a sawfish. Suppose I'll also switch my window manager just in case.
Another stride forward for Womens Rights!1
*starts playing feminist anthem*
If you look at stories from the times, many great men were called son of god or son of man and many were heralded as having been born of virgins. Jesus of Nazareth was not unique in that respect.
must have been sick of getting crucified so he decided to be a fish.
Greek myth is full of it. Any of the demi-gods like Hercules.
Given that his birth is contradictorily reported as occurring during the reigns of two different Herods (Herod the Great in Matthew, Herod Antipas in Luke) with two distinct lineages, with two distinct sets of supposed miracles attending his birth in the two birth stories, since Mark (the oldest and probable primary source of all three Synoptic gospels) not only had no birth but had no resurrection in the oldest extant copies (missing the last 16 verses altogether), one would have to agree. What survived was a syncretic hodge-podge that puts bits from Matthew and bits from Luke together into a Christmas myth that has wise men and taxation in Bethlehem at one and the same time. Nazereth didn't even exist as something more than a goatherding field and burial ground across the possible decades of his birth, and the term is a probable pun, not an actual designation of a birthplace. Nazereth was likely created to service the growing "Christian tourist" movement by the middle of the second century.
There is little reason to accept the baptism story either. Matthew inserted the quote from Isaiah -- which is taken completely out of context, which is a prophecy for a local king that failed spectacularly according to Chronicles, demonstrating that Isaiah was a pretty terrible prophet -- in order to connect Jesus to Jewish prophetic sayings, because Matthew was a Jew and viewed Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, irrelevant to the Gentiles. It was mistranslated and the mistranslation itself became the basis for a whole new myth loosely adopted from Mithraism and the Osiris cult (which which early Christianity, itself a cult, competed). The supposed slaughter of the innocents by Herod the Great was cut from the same cloth -- an attempt to create a connection to misquoted out-of-context prophecy, as was in all probability the connection to John the Baptist, who was by far the winningest Jewish apocalyptic cult that we have any record of. By making John "prophecy" Jesus and pass on his symbolic mantle to Jesus, early Jewish Christians were able to win over many disaffected followers of John after Herod (quite possibly in reality and not just myth) "cut off" his ministry rather suddenly, leaving his followers in a state of extreme cognitive dissonance and looking for any excuse to continue believing the Yahweh would come down and cleanse Israel of Herod's line and the Romans in a proper apocalypse.
Luke, on the other hand, was no lover of the Jews and if anything was part of the movement out of Israel to Rome, hence the prominence of Saul/Paul in his Acts and the blaming of the Crucifixion on the Jews, not the Romans. Which is silly, since the Jews without any doubt had all sorts of laws that put a man to death and the Romans could have cared less -- witness John's supposed head, cut off for mere sport (supposedly) by Herod the Great. The Romans, however, would never have involved themselves in the affairs of a two-bit itinerant preacher unless he was actively fomenting violent revolution, which the Gospels do not report him as doing (quite the contrary, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, render unto Caesar). But then, Luke is far more dressed up with material almost certainly added or originally written after the fall of the temple than even the rewritten Mark, and all of the miracles are suitably exaggerated both in Luke per se and in Acts.
Which is a long way to go from a virgin birth in a fish.
Humans, BTW, can easily have virgin births. Any woman with a perforate hymen, which is pretty much all women, who screws around sexually without actual penetration can have a virgin birth, because sperm deposited on the labia are perfectly capable of swimming up through the hole and fertilizing an egg. It is no doubt less likely than fertilization from a deep ejaculation, but as many women who have become pregnant from similarly external failures of a condom can attest, less likely does not mean impossible or even particularly unlikely. So Mary could just have been engaging in what amount
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Not that unlikely. Really, pretty easy. Lots of condom "failures" are little more than the deposit of part of an ejaculation on the labia.
Also, some women have stretchable hymens with comparatively large openings that don't actually tear initially when they have intercourse.
Finally, as various surviving stories make clear, a bride who was less than virginal on their wedding day had a few subterfuges they could use, with the help of their mother (for example) to survive their wedding night -- necessary given that the penalty for not being a virgin was being stoned to death, which hurts a lot and leaves you dead. A bladder of chicken blood hidden between the sheets or even in the vagina, released at the right time, would stain the sheets with enough blood to pass muster when they were hung over the balcony to prove to the crowd that the bride was a virgin. A wise husband might not even investigate the situation very closely or might collude with the bride himself if (for example) he loved her or she represented an advantageous alliance. Female blood was viewed as being "unclean", so it is not unlikely that the detailed circumstances "down there" were not heavily investigated by the groom in any way but one.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
He is back! And now deadly!
It is disgusting to me that human males are so primitive they base their world view on myths about human reproductive organs and death. Can we please get beyond this? I am a human male, and I have no desire to talk about whether or not some guy's penis has been in a woman's vagina. I mean, what do you want me to say? Good for you??? You humans sound like children. Can't we be adults about this? How is it we build electronics and nuclear power plants and rockets, yet 99.9% of the time at least 50% of humans can only think about their genitals??? We would be billion times more productive if men would get their minds out of the gutter and focus on the problems humanity needs to solve to survive the 21st century.
It's not the same thing, but Virgin Births reminded me of a report from 1860 of fish near Santa Barbara releasing live young.
https://archive.org/details/up...
"On Wednesday, March 20 (1860), we walked along the beach to the asphaltum beds, and over the hills, a long walk of eighteen or twenty miles. Some interesting things turned up during the day. We found a whale stranded on the beach. I had no idea how huge they look when fresh. He was forty-five feet long, and about thirteen to fifteen through from back to belly. Such pile of flesh I never saw in one mass, it was equal to at least half a dozen large elephants. We also found a crab that was just shedding its shell. We secured it in its soft, velvety, new shell, and the old one alongside. Not the least -- a half-naked Indian fishing on the shore had caught two of the remarkable vivaparoa fishes, which instead of laying eggs bring forth their young alive, a thing nowhere known except on the coast of California. We saw the mother fish with a number of little ones."