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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.
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
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.
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
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/
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.
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.