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.

Comments

Re:Jesus

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The title needlessly brought in "virgin birth". There are other scientific terms, like asexual reproduction, parthenogenesis etc. So take your beef to the editors needlessly adding a religious color to some innocuous scientific observation.

Also I have been around enough theists who would take a random scientific fact and argue it was predicted in scriptures. "Koran has referenced this fact of embryology" "Bible has always known the world was round" "The Manduk Upanishad has a verse describing the Schrodinger's Equation" "The fundamental particles electron, proton and neutron represent the Holy Trinity" "The Shaivaite philosophy that holds the dance of Shiva permeates the universe and is the fundamental cosmic energy is same as molecular vibrations providing temperature/heat energy in thermodynamics".

Score card?

The atheists are woefully outclassed by theists when it comes to linking random collection of (often inconsistent) scientific facts to religious principles to bolster their point of view.

Re:Jesus

[argStyopa]

And you know this how?

On a serious note, I'm not even a particularly religious person, but there's not a single human society in existence (or even historically documented) that didn't develop religion of some sort. To me that would suggest that there's some long-term survival advantage.

Further, there are still boundaries to what science knows and always will be. The WHY questions, as opposed to the HOWs. As a mechanism of cultural psychology, I don't see a problem with religion attempting to give people a method to approach those questions.

Of course, as a postmodern western American, I find that religion that becomes pre- and proscriptive is oppressive and frankly obnoxious. But to throw out the baby with the bathwater by flat-out criticizing faith is overstepping pretty far.