4 ms·
Man, the bible missed all of this when they were talking about the two animals of every species on the Ark. What else did they leave out?
by soperj 1y ago
Man, the bible missed all of this when they were talking about the two animals of every species on the Ark. What else did they leave out?
- NewJazz 1y agoLeviticus rightfully instructs you not to eat bats, but it seems to mistake them for special birds rather than mammals.
- nyeah 1y agoThere can't be much meat on a bat anyway.
- rsynnott 1y agoWait, is there a _specific_ prohibition? Like, they fail Old Testament dietary rules miserably _anyway_.
- NewJazz 1y agoThese are the birds you are to regard as unclean and not eat because they are unclean: the eagle, the vulture, [a bunch of other birds] and the bat" https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2011:13-19&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2011:...
- rsynnott 1y agoAaah, right, I suppose if you’re assuming it’s a bird it _would_ need a specific call-out, yeah. I was assuming it’d be covered by the hooves-and-stomachs stuff, but if you don’t think it’s a mammal in the first place that wouldn’t work. (From the above: “Bible Gateway is currently unavailable to consumers in the United Kingdom and European Union due to technical issues.” I am now very curious just which EU regulation the bible website was worried about.)
- tsimionescu 1y agoTo be fair, you almost always still need two individuals to get reproduction going - you just don't need to be as picky about which two individuals as you might think. There are a rare few animals that can sometimes self-reproduce, but it's not a common strategy in the animal kingdom, even among hermaphroditic animals.
- dekhn 1y agoParthenogenesis is not uncommon in animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_taxa_that_use_parthenogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_taxa_that_use_partheno... (I am mostly quibbling with "rare few animals" but I can't really say much about the relative prevalence of parthenogenesis compared to sexual reproduction.
- duskwuff 1y agoThey're less rare than you might think. Parthenogenesis ("virgin birth") occasionally occurs in some domestic birds, including chickens and turkeys. Due to the way sex determination works in birds, the offspring created this way are always male. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032579119370518 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003257911...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 1y agoThere are also a number of species of lizards, and one snake, which reproduce exclusively via parthenogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis_in_squamates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis_in_squamates In some though not all such species, there are no known male examples _at all_ (though in reptiles some forms of parthenogenesis can produce males).
- dexterdog 1y agoThank you so much for introducing me to this concept. I knew the word thanks to Shriekback. I used to have ducks. At one point when I only had 3 females, I found a broken egg with a fetus in it. I knew they were all female, but couldn't convince anybody of what I saw.
- bethekidyouwant 1y agoThey were actually intelligently designed this way any animal you can’t sex easily as a hermaphrodite
- IAmBroom 1y agoHere's some punctuation: ....,,,;;;:::!!!??? I don't have the space to help on your other issues.
- collingreen 1y agoThat's ok, the space key seems to work just fine :troll:
- rsynnott 1y agoThis always struck me as a bit odd, because it was a somewhat common belief around then, and for long after, that many animals reproduced by abiogenesis anyway. Why bother taking two mice on the ark; everyone knows that mice spontaneously emerge from river mud! (It’s possible that this was just a Greek quirk and never made it to Palestine, I suppose.)
- IAmBroom 1y agoThe idea persisted into the Middle Ages. Can't say for certain that it was continuous, however; the medieval supporters quoted Aristotle et al.
- philistine 1y agoListen, we still don't know how eels reproduce. Our knowledge has never been all inclusive and properly disseminated. The fearful cave-dwelling scribes who wrote the old testament were clearly not up to date on their biology.
- dormento 1y agoI didn't know either, but hn came to the rescue. In case you're one of today's lucky 10000: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/25/where-do-eels-come-from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/25/where-do-eels-...
- rsynnott 1y agoWell, no, I’m actually surprised that whoever wrote the Old Testament _was_ up enough on their biology (or at least aligned with biology, however accidentally) to realise that most animals reproduce sexually. This certainly wasn’t the conventional view in the Greek world, say, nor was it in the West until the 18th century or so.
- sampo 1y ago> What else did they leave out? Plants. Fungi.
- IAmBroom 1y agoThe latter they brought with an especially rank pot of Grandma Noah's sauerkraut.
- sidewndr46 1y agoIt was an early deployment of RAID1. Two copies of everything