評論
打印
What's the matter,don?You look worried.
你怎么了唐，看起來有些著急。
You know how people are always predicting that one day women will be able to have babies without men?
你是否曾聽說過某一天女性將不需要男性也可生小孩？
It turns out that some species of the Whiptail lizard have figured out how to do this and completely eliminated the male sex.
事實上一些種類的長尾蜥蜴已經可以做到這一點，并將全部的雄性完全消滅掉了。
You mean the species are all female?Exactly.
你的意思是物種全部是雌性？的確是這樣。
The females have the ability to lay eggs that hatch and grow into healthy lizards without needing to be fertilized by a male.
無須借助雄性受孕，雌性蜥蜴有能力產下可以孵化出健康的小蜥蜴的蛋。
The offspring are exact and complete genetic duplicates of the mothers.
其后代完全是母親們基因的復制品。
So the females are clonnig themselves.
這在本質上是雌性在克隆自己。
If that weren't enough, the female lizards take turns role-playing.
如果這還不夠的話，雌性蜥蜴會輪流扮演角色。
They perform a mating ritual in which one lizard acts like the male, and the second lizard acts like the female.
她們在交配過程中，一只扮演雄性，另一只扮演雌性。
The ritual causes the lizard acting as the female to ovulate and lay her eggs.
交配將使扮演雌性的蜥蜴排卵產蛋。
Then, a few weeks later, the two lizards switch roles and repeat this process so that the second female will be able to ovulate and lay her eggs.
幾周之后，兩只蜥蜴互換角色重復交配過程從而使得另一只雌性得以排卵。
It raises a lot of interesting questions.
這引發了許多有意思的問題。
For example, it's not clear how well an all female species can evolve and adapt to environmental changes.
例如，我們尚不清楚一個完全由雌性組成的種群在面臨環境變化是能否很好地適應和進化。
A species' survival depends in part on variation among its members.
一個種群的存在，部分地取決于其內部成員的多樣性。
If all the members of a species are identical, chances are greater that something like a change in the climate or a disease will wipe them all out.
如果一個種群中所有的成員具有同一性，那么當環境劇變或疾病肆虐時，它們的滅絕概率也將更大。
