Virgin births in animals are no longer rare
1–10 of 126 posts
Re: Virgin births in animals are no longer rare
#2Heh, what an appropriate theme for Christmas :)
Re: Virgin births in animals are no longer rare
#3I recall Josh McDowell citing the virgin birth as one of the defining reasons for believing Christ was the son of God.
I quite enjoyed Christopher Hitchens' take on Parthenogenesis: "Even if I grant you that, you still have all your work ahead of you to prove that he was divine."
Things like this add to that workload. Fascinating and festive and very HN.
Re: Virgin births in animals are no longer rare
#4I recall Josh McDowell citing the virgin birth as one of the defining reasons for believing Christ was the son of God. I quite enjoyed Christopher Hitchens' take on Parthenogenesis: "Even if I grant you that, you still have all your work ahead of you to prove that he was divine." Things like this add to that workload. Fascinating and festive and very HN.
"There is no god and I hate him!"
Re: Virgin births in animals are no longer rare
#5I recall Josh McDowell citing the virgin birth as one of the defining reasons for believing Christ was the son of God. I quite enjoyed Christopher Hitchens' take on Parthenogenesis: "Even if I grant you that, you still have all your work ahead of you to prove that he was divine." Things like this add to that workload. Fascinating and festive and very HN.
The Hebrew word for young girl was very close to the word virgin, there was only a subtle difference in the spelling.
Re: Virgin births in animals are no longer rare
#6I think what surprises me most about this is that the Boa produced only female offspring.
Per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system - humans have XY chromosomes, with XX female and XY male. Boas have ZW chromosomes, with ZZ male and ZW female. I'd expect parthogenesis to produce unviable WW offspring, and viable ZZ ones. But WW turns out to be viable, and ZZ either doesn't happen, or isn't viable.
I'd previously read about this happening in Komodo dragons, which also have ZW, and there the viable offspring were all male - which makes slightly more sense to me, genetically speaking, because the children can mate with the mother to get slightly more genetic diversity in their offspring.
Quick google, http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo... might shed some light on this: in boas, the W and Z chromosomes look identical, in other species they look very different. That might (partially?) explain why WW is viable. But I'm way out of my depth here.
Re: Virgin births in animals are no longer rare
#7I recall Josh McDowell citing the virgin birth as one of the defining reasons for believing Christ was the son of God. I quite enjoyed Christopher Hitchens' take on Parthenogenesis: "Even if I grant you that, you still have all your work ahead of you to prove that he was divine." Things like this add to that workload. Fascinating and festive and very HN.
The Hebrew word for young girl was very close to the word virgin, there was only a subtle difference in the spelling.
Are you implying that the meaning was lost in translation?
Re: Virgin births in animals are no longer rare
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Hebrew word for young girl was very close to the word virgin, there was only a subtle difference in the spelling.
Are you implying that the meaning was lost in translation?
That's a very common argument, indeed.
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_birth_of_Jesus
>The word "virgin" in Christian translations is disputed. The Hebrew word is "עלמה" (almah), which scholars agree means a young woman of child-bearing age, "but has nothing to do with whether she is a virgin", and the context of the passage makes it clear that Isaiah has in mind events in his and Ahaz's near future. The Greek-speaking author of Matthew, however, used the Greek translation of Isaiah, in which the word is given as "παρθένος", parthenos, meaning a virgin.[57] The Encyclopedia Judaica calls this "a two-millennium misunderstanding of Isaiah 7:14", which "indicates nothing concerning the chastity of the woman in question".[50]
Re: Virgin births in animals are no longer rare
#9I recall Josh McDowell citing the virgin birth as one of the defining reasons for believing Christ was the son of God. I quite enjoyed Christopher Hitchens' take on Parthenogenesis: "Even if I grant you that, you still have all your work ahead of you to prove that he was divine." Things like this add to that workload. Fascinating and festive and very HN.
The Hebrew word for young girl was very close to the word virgin, there was only a subtle difference in the spelling.
The new testament was written in Greek, not in Hebrew.
And yes, back then, the word virgin could actually have allegoric meaning(young/innocent/beautiful/... girl). Imagine if she was actually the first ever mammal to asexually reproduce..
Re: Virgin births in animals are no longer rare
#10I recall Josh McDowell citing the virgin birth as one of the defining reasons for believing Christ was the son of God. I quite enjoyed Christopher Hitchens' take on Parthenogenesis: "Even if I grant you that, you still have all your work ahead of you to prove that he was divine." Things like this add to that workload. Fascinating and festive and very HN.
His main argument was actually the Lord Liar Lunatic one, where you need to prescribe one of those descriptions to him (He argues).