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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
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.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/to...
parthenogenesis is a type of asexual reproduction in which the offspring develops from unfertilized eggs. It is particularly common amongst arthropods and rotifers, can also be found in some species of fish, amphibians, birds, and reptiles, but not in mammals. Parthenogenetic development also occurs in some plants species, such as roses and orange trees.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
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.
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??
Yes, virgin birth... which in biblical times, in that area of the world, meant that the woman was a virgin when she MARRIED. Doesn't have dick to do with god, God, or gods, except in the eyes of someone ignorant of their own religion.
I am a (religious) Greek actually, reading the New Testament in its original Greek text - it is very clear that "Virgin (Greek:parthena) Birth (Greek:genesis)" means a birth from a virgin... NOT "a birth from someone who was a virgin at some time".... something that you don't even have to read in the original Greek to understand! You can write that you don't believe it, but let's not change what it is writen and its very clear meaning.
Less dogmatic bullshit, more reality = better for everyone. It's not even all that uncommon of an event: http://www.encyclopedia.com/to...
parthenogenesis is a type of asexual reproduction in which the offspring develops from unfertilized eggs. It is particularly common amongst arthropods and rotifers, can also be found in some species of fish, amphibians, birds, and reptiles, but not in mammals. Parthenogenetic development also occurs in some plants species, such as roses and orange trees.
I just made a (not so off-topic) reference to God and the Virgin Birth my friend - we BOTH have science confirming reality: you have it for the parthenogenesis of what your link mentions, i have it for the parthenogenesis of Jesus Christ... no need to get upset, especially since my reality is confirmed from both SCIENCE and GOD!
Yes they were originally written in Greek. However they are stories written by Greeks about non-contemporaneous events in a part of the world that did not speak Greek and did not have Greek customs... in short you've done nothing to refute GP's point.
Sir, my primary refute is not based on the language but on the fact that i read the text (in the original Greek, but this fact is not so important) and it is very clear for the events it describes - for example, from Matthew 1:18-25 (the "New International Version", which i just checked against the Greek text and i can confirm it is a good translation):
" 18 This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about[a]: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. 19 Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet[b] did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. 20 But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus,[c] because he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 23 “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”[d] (which means “God with us”). 24 When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. 25 But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus. "
No need to believe it, but also no need to know Greek for you to understand the events as described - right?
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
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.
believe me, you would have a hard time debating with someone who seriously insists he (and everything around him) was created by a flying spaghetti monster, although you can't prove that's impossible.
"I win because I don't need to assert anything".
if you want to assert bullshit like "a woman spontaneously conceived the son of god" then that's your problem, pal. and i've no problem at all with the crap you may believe, as long as you don't want me to behave according to your beliefs. be rational, or forget about being taken seriously.
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.
It's not that atheists are childishly attacking other points of view (as most on the receiving side like to characterize it)
They're attacking backwards and terribly counterproductive systems of thought. While a lot of people can be remarkably pragmatic when it comes to dealing with the world while carrying the baggage of religious faith (by following evidence-based reasoning most places and walling off their faith off to the side, even if they think it's their guiding light), it's not a good thing... as they still have big ass blind spots that screw stuff up. Worse, way too many people wrap their entire view of the world around faith, and don't ask for explanations because that's not how faith works.
Lots of people that don't think they're "smart enough" for math or science are just being poorly educated. If you place the things you see in the world into a big contextual web of whys and hows... then it'll be much more obvious why stuff works. A great deal of what makes a person appear "smart" is an ability to correctly put things in context and extrapolate uses and purposes from that. It's not magic, it's having a functional base of knowledge to draw from.
Faith puts "bad data" in the contextual web and prevents good contextual analysis of what you see day to day. It's very counterproductive.
The world needs to solve problems by looking at evidence and choosing what best fits the presented facts through reason. Faith massively interferes with that process. (massive inequity, climate change, the middle east, gay rights, anti-vaxxers, etc)
If your atheist and yet somehow don't understand the immense benefits to evidence-based reasoning and just go off some kind of faith of your own... then yeah your an idiot. That's almost never what's going on with your run-of-the-mill atheist... but I understand why someone who chooses faith would think so.
I'm not even "hardcore athiest", as many would define it as I'll accept anything beyond what is reasonably well known is just that... unknown. However, I don't know a single religion that doesn't have major conflicts with where our knowledge is at in the present, so they're broken. I also don't make up stories to explain the unknowable, or give the unknown any kind of magical aura. It's just not known yet, get over it.
Faith-based reasoning is the problem that's being attacked. Not "just some other point of view".
Have there been scientifically documented cases of parthenogenesis in humans? If there has been, then please reference them. Otherwise, your religious musings have no more relevance to this article than that episode of ST:TNG where Troi gave birth to a lens flare.
I don't know any "scientifically documented cases of parthenogenesis in humans", i just mentioned God and the "Virgin Birth" (parthenogenesis) in a story related to... "Virgin Birth" (parthenogenesis)! I realy don't find an important reason some people (in Slashdot) must get so upset with this... so relax your "great scientific mind" and just accept that my "religious musings" is a "naive" criticism to Slashdoters!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
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.