Same-sex mice genetically engineered to have babies

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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