Scientists engineer fruit flies capable of 'virgin birth'

Oh, certainly nothing can go wrong with that!

Didn't think I'd wake up on a Saturday morning to read an article about fruit flies manifesting the immaculate conception.

Cue all the Madonna-flies with buzzes of:

“I made it through the wilderness

Somehow I made it through…..”

I expect these scientist will now be wanting a visit from the 3 wise men bringing gifts of, gold, and gold, and more gold, I mean what would they do with frankincense and myrrh. We use frankincense incense sticks at home, not sure if one can get ones of myrrh though..........just been told, yes you can.

Three mosquitoes will turn up bearing malaria, Zika virus and Dengue.

Oh, certainly nothing can go wrong with that!

Like what exactly? Fly species that present parthenogenesis are already present in nature as the article explain, what danger do you think would there be for laboratory fruit flies to be also included?

Animals and plants are not that dissimilar in some ways. Plants knock out a wide variety of variance in seed to improve the chance of enough surviving. There is typical and rarer atypical variance. The atypical variance in a scattergun insurance policy for maintaining and evolving a species when the typical variance just won't cut it.

In animals, that variance usually manifests itself in adaptations that might give an evolutionary advantage amongst a wide variety of random differences. The majority are typical, minor differences in height, weight, muscle, vision, sensitivity etc. Some are much rarer. Take syndactyly for example - webbed digits. It happens in humans, whilst all dogs are born with webbed paws. Most lose it very early in life, but some, like Newfoundlands, retain it.

So, could humans produce a virgin birth? Feasibly. All the genetic data and reproductive equipment is actually there to produce a clone. Fertilisation of an embryo would be required for a standard birth, so you would need an atypical clonal embryo that didn't need fertilisation. If the genetic data is present, don't rule it out. Someone, somewhere, may have had some explaining to do.

Oh, certainly nothing can go wrong with that!

Absolutely.

We've seen how this plays out in the past.

We have seen what happened with similar kind of research being done in the past, no negative consequences while important biological information is gained. This would contradict the unwarranted worries about things going wrong.