Christmas is upon us . While our minds may be focused on finishing up our shopping , the reason for this season ( as my good Catholic auntie will remind me ) is the birth of Jesus .
The fact that Jesus ' female parent Mary conceived him while remaining a Virgo has long been part of Christian religious belief . No natural father . No sex . No spermatozoan . Chalk it up as a miracle . Some people do n’t have " miracle" in their lexicon , though , so we have to ask : " Are virgin births possible?“
You bet they are ! There ’s actually a lot more " “ or less , really " “ to the shuttle and the bees than our parent told us .
Hot, Steamy Asexual Reproduction
Reproduction commonly stick with the same basic blueprint : Boy meets missy ; sperm meets egg ; congratulations , you have a child .
Sometimes , though , there ’s no male child and there ’s no spermatozoan . There ’s just a girlfriend , an bollock and eventually a babe . This virgin birth is calledparthenogenesis(from Greek , mean " Virgo creation" ) , and it bump when an embryo uprise by itself without fertilization of an ovum ( egg cell ) .
The resulting baby is call a parthenogen , and because it results from the heritage of only a single sex chromosome from the female parent , it will always be female in animals where two like chromosomes determine the female sex ( the XY sexuality - determination system ) , and always male in animals where two like chromosomes make for a male ( the ZW sex - determination organisation , where WZ is female , ZZ is male and WW is inviable ) .
Scientists have found a number of beast that can multiply this direction , and have also figured out how to get other animals to perform the trick . Some researchers have even tried to make it materialise in human beings .
Some Examples:
Virgin Birth in Humans?
Because of the problems stem from genomic imprinting , research into human parthenogenesis is n’t center on procreative therapy , but the production of embryonic shank cells for medical intervention . Last year , Dr. Elena Revazova and her research team at International Stem Cell Corporation get the first intentional human bow electric cell from unfertilized human eggs through parthenogenesis . Intentionalis the primal Word of God there , because before ISC ’s accomplishment , Hwang Woo - Suk , who famously fabricated the resultant of his attempt to extract shank cells from cloned human embryos , unknowinglyproduced the first human embryo from virgin birth .
bow cubicle are one affair , but a bouncing baby is another . Could a homo course be produced by virgin parturition ? In theory , yes , if a number of biochemical event go on by opportunity or genic defect in close succession and the bollock does n’t complete meiosis ( when an orchis does this , it loses one-half of its genetic material to make room for the maternal deoxyribonucleic acid in the sperm . But without the sperm , each half of the dual-lane eggs would come up short on genetic fabric ) . The chances of all that fall out are almost zero . But even if nature found a way , we run into genomic imprinting again , so we would n’t wrap up with a workable fertilized egg .
There is one documented grammatical case of a naturalhalf - parthenogenetic nativity . In 1995,Nature Geneticsreported a child that had some cells ( about 50 % ) that comprise of transmitted material only from his mother and some that were normal and lie of a DNA from both parent . MD who studied the child theorized that one of the mother ’s egg that had been fertilized by the father fused with an unfertilized egg that was divide parthogenetically .
Might Jesus been a biologic one - in - a - billion like that minor ? Not according to Christian belief , which holds thatthe virgin birth of Jesus was not parthenogenesis , but purely heaven-sent and not explainable by science as a natural unconscious process .
