flora_explora

Well, plants really don't have to deal with our binary bullshit. Most of them don't have any sex because they have perfect flowers anyways, meaning their flowers have male and female gametes.

If Santa is the Queen, there needs to be some male drones impregnating him. It would make sense that the reindeer would fly to the freshly hatched Santas to mate with them. The sledge is only their form of wings then.

As a biologist, it is always surprising to me, how frequently people don't realize that all plants in our environment have some sort of reproduction. Like, that grass also has flowers and all house plants would also flower (except for ferns) if they were growing under the right conditions. Plant blindness is real.

Just that this "robin" isn't one, it actually is a thrush. A robin would be Erithacus. They are both in different families even (and also look pretty different).

Hm, so if you don't want to use the term vanguard anymore, how are you going to talk about the seizing of power by a small authoritarian group during a revolution? And what would be your solution to prevent this from happening?

I really dislike cultivars like this where they have been changed so much it doesn't look like actual plants...

Zarathustra kann mich mal :P

You mean Pica pica?

Confusingly, there is the animal in the post that is commonly called pika (Ochotona daurica). What I had to think of first was Pica pica though (the Eurasian magpie)

Funnily enough, I just watched this very informative video on why the lactase-producing gene is actually not necessary at all for you to eat and digest dairy. If your gut biome can digest lactose, you are completely fine ;)

Also, it feels intuitive to think that there are these genetic differences between Europeans and Asians etc. But this is much more complex than you would think. Humans are much more diverse genetically, especially people from Africa. If you test whole populations of people you can maybe see some generic trends, but this does not help predict anything on an individual level. There is way too much variation possible for you to reliably predict a person's genome. And as hinted above, the genetic variation is much higher on the African continent, where populations are genetically more similar to populations outside of Africa then to other populations in Africa. That's why there is zero biological basis to racism btw, it is a social construct in its entirety!

Analogous to this is the difference between sexes. The variation within one sex is much higher than between sexes. And also, there is so much fuzziness in how we classify sexes with a plethora of edge cases. That's why there isn't any biological basis to sexism either, it is just a social construct.

So saying anything about the bloodline of your child really is meaningless. Unless we're speaking of individual genetic differences passed down from your ancestors. Then you could calculate certain probabilities based on larger population data how likely it is that your child may have some genetic diseases etc. But even then you wouldn't know if it firstly actually had a certain genetic mutation and secondly if this mutation will be expressed throughout your child's life. So this is also not really predictive...

Yeah, that one is really weird!

As a biologist, my first thought would maybe be what physiological needs my child has and how it will interact with the natural environment. And what strange foods it could potentially eat.