The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins,  is an intriguing, popular-science book; as I was crawling my way through it yesterday, I came across a brief blurb concerning the female greenfly; a species that can produce asexually:

“Female greenflies can bear live, fatherless, female offspring, each one containing all the genes of its mother … … an embryo in the mother’s ‘womb’ may have an even smaller embryo inside her own womb. So a female greenfly may give birth to a daughter and a grand-daughter simultaneously, both of them being equivalent to her own identical twins…” (from Chapter 3; Immortal coils, p. 43 in the 30th anniversary issue).

For any and all ultra-feminists out there, you may want to delve into a book cited by Dawkins (in his excellent Endnotes, on p. 275): The Redundant Male, by Jeremy Cherfas and John Gribbin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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