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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.
Sawfish must be a lot smarter than humans since they didn't form a nonsensical religion around it.
Life, uh, finds a way.
God! God finds a way...
note before down-mod: "Virgin Birth"!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
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.