Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Dragons Don’t Need To.

By NEIL SHUBIN / NYTimes

DRAGONS and virgin births are the stuff of myth and religion. Except, that is, in Kansas, where they have recently come together in a way that should alter the way many of us look at nature and demonstrate the risks in our habit of using it to help us make ethical decisions.

Keepers at Wichita’s zoo got a surprise last year when they found developing eggs inside the Komodo dragon compound. Komodos are large rapacious lizards naturally found in Indonesia, but increasingly populating zoos around the world. Finding fertile embryos of dragons is a joyous occasion — there are only a few thousand of the lizards in the wild and captive breeding may be the only way to keep the species around.

But these eggs — two of which hatched a few weeks ago — were unusual: they developed from a female that had had no male of the species in close proximity for more than a decade. Judging from similar occurrences over the past two years in Britain, it appears that these lizards sometimes use a form of virgin birth in which eggs hatch without conception. The embryos are genetic clones of the mother.

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My comment:

Interesting how cloning calls into question our penchant for looking to nature for moral guidance on questions ranging from when life begins to same sex marriages. Perhaps looking to nature for that moral guidance is not unlike looking to the Rorschach certainty of your friendly local holy book ... you can find what ever answer you're looking for in it ... and that offers no moral guidance at all beyond the echoes of your own prejudices.