This 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.)
Listen, 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.
Well, 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.
What was this view exactly? They would have know their pets and farm animals reproduced sexually. I guess it isn't a leap to think all mammals? So what animals did they think did not?
So, we tend to think that it’s just common sense that most animals reproduce sexually (actually I think most people would assume that _all_ animals do; in fact, as with most things, there are edge cases), but, well, to an extent that’s because we already know that. The historical view was a bit different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation
To 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.
They'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.
Thank 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.
Parthenogenesis is not uncommon in animals:
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.
Aaah, 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.)
