This House Believes That A Virgin Birth Is Scientifically Possible, Even If Improbable!

While my opponent has presented an interesting case about the boy who was born through parthenogenesis means. I feel I need to point out that this case is completely misleading, and what my opponent is saying is complete hogwash. To do this I am going to address this case point by point and then get to the Jesus question later. The Nature Genetics case My opponent states that the “child the doctors found was not born due to any semen, but rather was born throgh the asexual reproduction via miosis ii of the mother.” This is a fabrication as in the article cited the doctors in fact say the following, “From these studies, FD (the child's acronym) appeared to be a 46, XY/46, XX mosica, but with extreme segregation of the two lines between different tissues." In fact the authors go on to say that this child was born from a (sperm fertilized) zygote that somehow underwent a separation in the blastomere, where the blastomere that formed contained the different paternal DNA in one part and the maternal DNA in the other part. Or in the authors words, they “suggest that in FD's mother, parthenogenetic activation of the oocyte was followed by second body polar extrusion.....and production at first cleavage of one blastomere containing a female pronucleus and one containing male and female pronuclei”. What my opponent also fails to report is that in the manuscript the data claiming parthenogenesis is all based solely on the white blood cells. However, when the authors tested other tissue cells they found that this boy had the fathers Y gene present. So this verifies that the Y gene was present, and the only way the Y gene could have got there was by fertilization which means a non-virgin birth. Importantly, the situation where a child gets all of one chromosome from one parent is not uncommon at all. In fact its is called uniparental disomy and it is very well documented. (1,2) Interestingly this boy displayed characteristics of a chromosomal deformity such as learning difficulties and intermittent aggressive behavior. This chormosomal deformity (uniparental disomy) could be the reason that the authors thought they had discovered a partial type of parthenogenesis when in fact the answer was far more simple. Lastly, as cited in the manuscript, and other sources, parthenogenic embryos in mice never get to the birthing stage, as the embryo dies post implantation as it needs paternal genes. That is it needs the dads DNA, it cannot survive with only one parents DNA. In my opinion, my opponent really needs to present a better case. So far what has been presented shows that parthenogenesis is in fact not possible. The Jesus Case The Jesus Case is one that I think should get dismissed purely on the grounds that my opponent said they are going to show virgin birth is scientifically sound. The facts are that the Bible is highly unreliable, so how are we to trust the bible when there are so many inaccuracies that lead to questions such as, did Jesus actually exist?(3) In this round I have shown my opponents arguments to be misleading and absurd. As such I believe my opponent has yet to even prove the possibility of a virgin birth and as such I hand the debate back to my opponent. (1) http://genetics.thetech.org... (2) http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov... (3) http://rationalwiki.org...