The Blog I Never Use

That's right, a shark gave birth without the aid of male genetic material (parthenogenesis). I suppose that there are a few things that we can take from this beyond shock:

1. According to the article, mammals are now the only vertebrates who have not conceived via parthenogenesis in controlled situations (confirmed by the virgin birth of Komodo dragons earlier this year. For those of you to whom such things matter, this adds a whole new level of plausibility to the virgin birth narrative: though it has not been confirmed that humans can reproduce this way, the evidence of several other, related species doing so tends to support the possibility. Note: this is an outsider argument for possibility, from the inside, it just explains the possible workings of a miracle which still needed divine guidance. It is for explanations to people who believe that all we believe was a hoax: the next time someone says that the virgin birth is impossible, you say, "it isn't impossible for sharks and Komodo Dragons," --make sure you say "Komodo," otherwise, they'll just think you're crazy, you might also want the articles to be on-hand.

2. This answers the area of my greatest lack of understanding of the evolutionary theories that I learned about years ago. There were two (basic) ways in which scientists said that vertebrates appeared on the scene: 1. many of them appeared at once in various places, in independent cycles of development or 2. one developed and then reproduced. I always thought that the first (though it fits what we know about the unexplained leaps in development that are obvious in archaeological finds) was rather implausible, and that the chances that would bring a male and female into being independently and that they would find each other and reproduce were astronomical (bars being far in the future). The second was that only one member of a species would develop and that species would die out with that single member.

So, I suppose that it is plausible, even for those strict creationists out there, to believe that God did something that made this rare form of reproduction commonplace in the beginning stages of species development so that the earth could produce more than the small animal population originally present (check Gen 6-9, ain't every species gonna' fit in that!). After all, Gen 1 indicates that God created animals, it doesn't tell us the details. This was actually just about what Darwin (a Christian) had in mind in his earliest works: he proposed a few original creatures that developed into the vast number that we have now. And, for you less strict creationists, it helps to explain one of the tools God used to produce animals in the first place. There is still a miracle here.

If you're a more through-going evolutionist, an unknown cause for the proliferation of these incidents at each major period of development, accompanied by a (thus far not in evidence) similar proliferation of inter-species evolution, would give evidence of one possible road to species development.