this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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454
For the Lizadies out there! (mander.xyz)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 72 points 2 months ago (1 children)

All fun and games until they all go extinct because their environment had a slight variation and they could not adapt to it because they're all clones with the same genes

^I'm not a biologist please don't kill me

[–] [email protected] 60 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It's more complicated than that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's kind of why I said I'm not a biologist

[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 months ago

No, you're right. It's mentioned in the Wikipedia article that lack of genetic diversity is a large concern for obligate parthenogenic animals

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago

Was Jesus a lizard? Exhibit A: Parthenogenesis.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

When lizards do it it's really cool, but then when I have sex with a clone of myself suddenly I'm "weird" and "misusing research funds" and "banned from IKEA"

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago

Life, uh, finds a way.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails "a bunch of lesbos" and he wasn't even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556411/

That study has a great diagram:

Observe the science man presiding over the lizards and their inscrutable hormones

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That pretty accurately describes my experience with progesterone, yeah.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And when everyone's female... Muahahahahaha, no one will be.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

this was not my idea of gender abolition but sure as hell I would welcome it

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Are they even females if their species only has one sex?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Well, female and male are defined based on their gonads. So yes, these are females because they produce egg cells. There are also animals that have more than two sexes or have sexes that change over time, or that are even weirder. But in all these cases, how we classify their sex is by their gonads.

Philosophically speaking, sex as a category is just a way of abstraction for us to better understand the world. But it is just that, a simplified view on the world, a social construct.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

to the lizards - they probably wouldn't call themselves females if they could

to humans - our definition of female is producing the large gamete so if all those lizards do that then, from our human perspective, they're female

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Lezards heh