Roy&grant

Roy&grant

MISSING YOU.

Whoever wrote the Fandom wiki page for Alan Scott was REALLY feeling the new issue oh my god

Popular Science

How a female-only line of salamanders 'steals' genes from unsuspecting males

What the heck is kleptogenesis? Read on.

So I just discovered that there's a kind of salamander that takes entire genomes from males of different species and mixes them up however it pleases. I can't even say it's a "species" because a single individual can have the entire genomes from four different species knocking around in it, so scientists just refer to the "unisexual" members of the genus (because they're all female).

We don't even know what salamander they're originally descended from, because at some point they threw that genome out. Only the mitochondrial DNA are the same in this fucking ship of Theseus of an amphibian. Please keep in mind that it's commonly accepted that the whole purpose of an organism is to propagate its DNA. This salamander said NOPE.

This doesn't make sense. This isn't how species is supposed to work for any organism, let alone an animal. What even is this salamander????

I came up with a new saying:

"You wouldn't bake a cat just because it jumped into the oven."

It means that just having a really, really good opportunity to do something awful is not an excuse to do it. That it isn't enough that you never go out of your way to do evil, you're also supposed to go out of your way to do the right thing, even in situations where the wrong thing to do would be extremely easy and profitable, and passively allowing it to happen would be easier than going out of your way to do better than that.