Same-sex mice genetically engineered to have babies

Re:Same-sex mice genetically engineered to have babies by elipsey on Thursday October 11, 2018 @03:40PM (#18196428)

It seems like your objection is semantic, and depends on the meaning of "have." Does it mean, strictly, vaginal birth? Natural conception? Does a Cesarean section count? Does artificial fertilization count? Only if it's in-vitro?

It is stipulated that the babies are the direct genetic descendants of, and only of, the two female mice, and it appears that the babies are physically under (at least one of) their care. So the babies were produced by artificial assortative mating and are under the care of their their parents. If you think that artificial reproduction of any kind isn't really "having babies", where do you draw the line between what is or is not artificial?

I concede that "have babies" obviously has some generally agreed upon connotation beyond the literal meaning of the words; if I picked up someones’ babies at the park and said I "had babies," my statement would be regarded as unreasonable by almost everyone.

I'm not writing this just to be pedantic. I think artificial reproduction is interesting and sometimes controversial, because it invalidates our assumptions about reproduction.

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Re:Same-sex mice genetically engineered to have babies by gnulinux on Thursday October 11, 2018 @05:31PM (#18197190)

My objection is semantic but the semantic seems important in this case. We know all groups in animal kingdom have some sort of weird, sometimes extremely rare non-sexual reproduction patterns, except mammals. If the original title was correct, then this would be ground-breaking, we would have to go to Wikipedia and change some lines.

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Re:Same-sex mice genetically engineered to have babies by elipsey on Thursday October 11, 2018 @06:41PM (#18197608)

Thanks. It seems like the title changed during our conversation and I didn't know what it used to be, or when.

If the title displayed to me had been "Same-sex mice genetically engineered to reproduce asexually" I would have thought it implied that the new, artificial mouse genotype could reproduce asexually without further human intervention, which would be clearly incorrect.

Edit: Does sexual reproduction formally require sexual intercourse? At this point I'm out of my depth. :p

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Re:Same-sex mice genetically engineered to have babies by gnulinux on Friday October 12, 2018 @09:00AM (#18201092)

Original title was "Same-sex mice have babies" which is the title of the article. I think current title is perfectly fine, and is actually what's going on.

> Does sexual reproduction formally require sexual intercourse? At this point I'm out of my depth. :p

Yes, but not necessarily sex (e.g. pollination), but it's exclusively sex for mammals. We do not know of any other method for mammal reproduction other than sex. This puts mammals in a very weird spot since they're the only known group in animals that have not been observed to reproduce non-sexually.

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