Parthenogenesis & Indian epics

Parthenogenesis & Indian epics

A couple of days ago, I found something really interesting in the daily news. A Shark in the Detroit zoo gave "virgin birth" to a female through its eggs!!
It definitely sounded interesting, so I dug up more on the net.

Although giving birth through eggs is common in lower vertibrae (e.g., frogs), higher vertibrates {humans, whales, sharks} usually bear eggs or babies through copulation, followed by internal fertilization. Even among lower vertibrae, ovulation takes place after a proper sexual intercourse, which I thought was the basis of all life among multi-cell organisms (cell division is typically a single cell organism mode of evolution)!! But this discovery, to me, is belief-defying and truly ground-breaking!


Although, these so-called virgin births are common in invertebrates like snails, it is highly unlikely that the female, white spotted "bamboo shark" , which typically copulates with a male and reproduces through eggs, can achieve such a feat.

That brought new questions to the fore and old answers added more surprise!!

As it turns out, "Parthenogenesis" [giving a virgin birth without copulation] is NOT AN IMPOSSIBILITY AMONG HUMANS EITHER!!!

In 1900, Jacques Loeb achieved the first clear case of artificial parthenogenesis when he pricked unfertilized frog eggs with a needle and found that in some cases normal embryonic development ensued. In 1936 Gregory Pincus induced parthenogenesis in mammalian (rabbit) eggs by temperature change and chemical agents. Artificial parthenogenesis has since been achieved in almost all major groups of animals, by mechanical, chemical, and electrical means, though it usually results in incomplete and abnormal development.

How about humans? There is some evidence that natural parthenogenesis does occasionally occur in humans. There are many instances in which impregnation has allegedly taken place in women without there being any possibility of the semen entering the female genital passage!!
[Raymond Bernard, The Mysteries of Human Reproduction, Mokelumne Hill, CA: Health Research, n.d., pp. 47-50, 56-63]

. In some cases it was found either in the course of pregnancy or at the time of childbirth that the female passages were obstructed. In 1956 the medical journal Lancet published a report concerning 19 alleged cases of virgin birth among women in England, who were studied by members of the British Medical Association. The six-month study convinced the investigators that human parthenogenesis was physiologically possible and had actually occurred in some of the women studied.

SO HOW LONG AGO DID THE IDEA THAT A SPERM AND AN EGG ARE NOT ALWAYS NEEDED TO FORM A ZYGOTE OF A HIGHER VERTIBRATE ORIGINATE? Apparently, it goes all the way back to Pythagoras {Yep, the old man did not just sit around wondering about right-angled triangles :) ..apparently he was busy with some right angles as well }. He is believed to be involved in atleast one of the "ovist" and "aura seminalis" theories of conception. In the ovist theory, the egg by itself has the ability to reproduce and does not need a sperm!! According to aura seminalis theory, the male sperm only supplies a vial stimulus which then initiates the amazing journey of life!!

Modern science, ofcourse, rejected both these theories when it found that a sperm actually uses its inertia to break into an egg and completes the fertilization to form a zygote!

However, another busy man called Loeb showed that for fertilization to occur, neither the sperm nucleus nor the spermatozoon itself need enter the egg, or even be in proximity to the egg. He replaced the sperm by ALKALINE solutions, ULTRAVIOLET rays, and other stimuli. Alexander Gurwitsch discovered in the 1920s that cells emit weak ultraviolet ('mitogenetic') radiation that can cause cell division in other cells at a distance -- a finding still resisted by mainstream scientists.

It does not end there. Sea urchins have been found to be able to virginally reproduce through eggs after EXPOSURE TO SUNLIGHT (the ultraviolet part of it is known to trigger the birth).

There is an increasing debate/awareness among modern scientist groups about the possibility that a change in the pH scale inside the ovaries could trigger the process of virgin birth!!


Now, where do the Indian epics tie into all this you ask?

I remember my epic stories {Ramayana & Mahabharata} telling me about how kunti conceived "karna" after a look at sun god and how anjaneya helped someone conceive because she drank beads of sweat that dropped off him. Silly superstitions and strident orthodoxy, I thought.

Now, it makes me wonder if the realm of modern science is not large enough to fathom the depths of faith {religious or otherwise}, a product of millions of years of human evolution and centuries of recorded human knowledge.


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