Wednesday, May 23, 2007

This must have been the most surprising news I have read in a while:

"A team of American and Irish researchers have confirmed that some female sharks can reproduce without having sex, the first time that scientists have found the unusual capacity in such an ancient vertebrate species."

Unfortunately the baby shark was killed by a sting ray just after his/her birth :-(

It is amazing that there are still so many things that we do not know about nature.

It has been a while since I have been a firm believer that there are no "unnatural" things, but rather that there are still a lot of things that we do now know how to explain. In the past people used myths and legends, now we have science. But science is our reasoning based on available evidence, and its conclusions are only hypothesis in general, such as the assumption that all sharks reproduce through sex. They are our best guess until you find a counterexample, like this one :-)

read more | digg story

1 comment:

A Fly on the Wall said...

yup yup - i refer you back to Life of \pi.
:-P