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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Look, as far as sexual reproduction without any sex goes, the most famous of all products of misconception is Jesus.
There are four accounts of the life of Jesus in the Christian New Testament.
And this is Dr Meredith Lake, the host of Soul Search on ABC Radio National, a historian who has looked in-depth at the Bible and all its ins and outs.
One of them, the Gospel of Matthew, that one does give you a little bit. It quotes an older text from the Jewish scriptures, it's complicated, written hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, that talks about a virgin giving birth to a son. But the people who read the original text didn't think it was about Jesus. Not unless they could see into the future, I suppose.
And he talks about how Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant, quote, through the Holy Spirit.
So that's Matthew's gospel. And the Christian Bible isn't the only place chock-a-block full of interesting stories about immaculate conceptions and special extracurricular circumstances. There's Romulus and Remus, Krishna, Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec sun god, Huan Di, the yellow emperor, and even the wizard Merlin, whose mum was a nun and whose father was apparently an incubus.
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Chapter 2: What examples of virgin birth are discussed in the episode?
You know, sexual reproduction, but without having sex with someone else. I think that some of the most flexible lovers in all of the world are plant lovers.
Plants are very sexual and they're being sexual all the time.
Dr Michael Whitehead would know. He's an evolutionary ecologist whose PhD focused on sexual deception in plants.
Actually, one of the things we most love about plants is the embodiment of their sexuality, and that's the flowers.
Yeah, so it makes sense that we give them to each other when we're trying to bang, right?
That's it. They started it. Plants... They have a few ways of dividing their sexual function. There are species that have male and female plants.
Heteronormative plant alert.
So cannabis is one of the most famous examples where you have female plants that only ever bear female flowers and male plants that only ever bear male flowers and they can only mate male to female.
I find this funny and ironic that cannabis adheres to traditional gender roles. But the vast majority of plants are not like this.
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Chapter 3: How do historical narratives relate to virgin births?
But Freckle made this look easy. She's got a little belly, she ate extra fish, she refused to do any work and popped out a ravioli. Why don't we all do it like that? Because actually having to do the sex, finding a partner, wooing, sharing bodily fluids, making that all a priority is a bit hard and a bit weird.
It really is.
Andrew Durso is our guest herpetologist, studier of reptiles, for this series.
Not everyone does it, right? There's definitely even many snakes and lizards that are capable of asexual reproduction.
It's been observed in Komodo dragons and reticulated pythons.
There's many lizard species and at least one snake species where it's obligate, right? There are no males. only females, and so they just reproduce clonally.
This is different from freckle because freckle could sexually reproduce if she had access to a male and he met her standards. But these obligate species only reproduce through parthenogenesis, and thus they're always clones of the mother. Whiptail lizards, for example, are an American skinky looking lizard who are always Elizabeth and never Elijah because they're always female.
And they even partake in some good old pseudo copulation.
Where they still have the behaviour, copulatory behaviour of one female. with another and that stimulates ovulation, but there's no sperm transfer because there's no sperm to transfer.
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Chapter 4: What are the different reproductive strategies in plants?
Oh! So virgin births in sharks and rays might be way more common than we ever suspected before, but largely invisible without genetic testing. How much more is there out there? In Californian condors, a bird that almost went extinct, and actually that's why they've got heaps of genetic info on each individual, they recently found that two females had reproduced parthenogenically.
Without genetic tests, we'd perhaps never have known this. You might notice that we haven't talked about any examples of parthenogenesis in mammals, apart from Jesus and other historical and mythological creatures. Most of this virgin birth stuff that happens on Earth is in plants and invertebrates, really.
And on top of that, parthenogenesis has been observed in 80 taxa of vertebrates across fish, reptiles and amphibians. But we have much less evidence, almost none, for this happening in mammals. This is because apparently there's certain genetic passcodes for mammals that must come from two parents. It's called genomic imprinting and it sort of makes the puzzle pieces come together.
I imagine this like two bank guards that both need to turn the key at the same time to unlock the Vault of Life. But nature doesn't seem to ever be held back by rules. And I know you're all wondering about it, so I've spent some time trawling through scientific literature about parthenogenesis in humans.
If a human female does have a miraculous event in her reproductive tract, it might manifest as a teratoma, a sort of tumour, which can sometimes be organised to have body fat, hair, limbs and even teeth. But without the male contribution, skeletal muscle doesn't develop and this doesn't become a viable human baby.
There are other cases of genetics being combined into what are called chimeras, like the mythical beasts that are made up of multiple animals. There was this boy who had two full sets of DNA expressed in different tissues in his body. He was mostly his mum and dad, but his blood had no father. It was only his mother's genetic
This sort of discovery has led to a controversial hypothesis that there might be mammalian parthenogenesis happening because if females are engaging in sexual intercourse, she may have no reason to raise the alarm about a virgin birth. So perhaps parthenogenic individuals go unnoticed.
Maybe we will never know until there is much more comprehensive genetic testing of each individual human across Earth. Or we could all stop having sex, eh? And just see if anyone gets born. Sex is so weird, right? And you're listening to a series all about it produced by me, Anne Jones and the What The Duck team at ABC Radio National.
Stopping having sex is actually something that I'll be delving into in the next episode. Does all this rumpy-pumpy really have a future? Remember, if you've got some sort of issue going on in your relationships, you should drop me a line at whattheduck at abc.net.au. Are you perpetually single? Are you sick of being the alpha male? Are you just way too attractive to the opposite sex?
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