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Parthenogenesis can occur naturally in humans (and therefore presumably other mammals) - in fact, the topic has a whole lot of Switchboard, Head Shop and even Temple implications...
As briefly as i can manage, a mammal capable of parthenogenesis occurs when the X chromosome is duplicated twice, resulting in a karyotype of 48XXXY (known as Klinefelter's syndrome type 2, and/or true hermaphroditism - the much commoner Klinefelter's type 1 is karyotype 47XXY). Klinefelter's type 2 individuals have both male and female gonads (testes and ovaries) and, IIRC, may have full external sets of both male and female genitalia, or ambiguous genitalia (tho when it occurs in humans they, like many other intersex children, are usually surgically altered at birth, often without the parents' consent or even knowledge). In outward appearance they can range from passing-as-male via androgynous to passing-as-female, tho without surgical or hormonal alteration (i really don't want to have to call it "treatment") they tend to (but don't always) have mostly female secondary sexual characteristics and a female gender identity.
(Please note that my source for this information is word of mouth from an intersex friend who knows people with this condition, and thus i don't have links for it. 48XXXY gets a passing mention on the Wikipedia article for Klinefelter's syndrome, but doesn't have its own article there, and i'm not sure if there are primary sources online to enable one to be written. I'd be grateful if anyone does have any links about it, since corroboration is always welcome...)
People with the XXXY karyotype are capable of self-fertilisation, but not of being fertilised by sperm from anyone else. I know of cases of pregnancy, but all ended in abortion, to my knowledge without the "patients" being given choice or consent over it, due to the extreme medical, psychiatric, governmental, military and religious suppression of transgender and intersex people (a subject which i could rage about for gods only know how long)...
I'm not certain if the offspring of such a self-fertilisation would be an exact clone of the mother, or if genetic differences would occur from the splitting of diploid cells with karyotype XXXY into haploid eggs and sperm and then recombination (if that is in fact what happens, i'm not sure if it's been reserached well enough to know if both gametyes are produced "normally" and then form a zygote or if the zygote comes directly from the stem cells) - no idea at all if this is covered in university teaching of genetics...
The Temple aspect, of course, comes from the belief in some sectors of Christianity that not only Jesus was born of a virgin, but that Mary was also born of a virgin herself (i forget the exact theological reasons some Catholics, IIRC, have for believing this was necessary, but there's a convoluted reason that has something to do with purity and original sin), and the links in some Gnostic scriptures of Mary and her mother to priesthoods with a tradition of transsexual and intersex priestesses...
There's even crazier shit related to that, but it would probably be way off-topic for Laboratory... |
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