Dr Ann Jones

So we have greedy hummingbirds and needy plants to thank for cigarettes.

This example does show the lengths that have been travelled in increments over the course of evolution to avoid selfing because you want to avoid inbreeding.

But Michael says it's a phenomenally small amount of outcrossing of sex with other individuals that needs to happen to keep plant populations healthy.

It's beneficial for plants to be able to fertilise each other, fertilise themselves and to have the flexibility to overcome situations that occur around them.

be that Jesus was born of a selfing event, that in a mammal, a human, was Mother Mary a simultaneous hermaphrodite who could self-inseminate?

This would actually be no less miraculous, as far as I can tell, than being conceived by the Holy Spirit, because as far as we know, there is one species of vertebrate that is able to self-inseminate.

That is, provide the male and the female gametes to make a baby without contact with another individual.

It's the mangrove killifish.

This is a small silvery grey slip of a fish with a black spot at the top of its tail which looks a little bit like the eye on the side of its head.

Which way is which?

Actually, it's both.

It can self-produce both sperm and eggs and fertilise itself.

But this sort of having sex with yourself isn't the only way that nature produces apparently immaculate conceptions.

Okay, a manipulative stingray sounds like a brilliant character for a Pixar movie.

Freckle lived for about nine years in a tank with other female rays.

No males.

They just hung out and gossiped and had pillow fights.

I don't know.

Parthenogenesis.

This is nature's virgin birth, a spontaneous pregnancy in a female.