And you’re good…you’re really good…

I could actually understand all that and most importantly, my head didn’t explode! (this coming from someone whose recollection of the “beginning of life” is loadsa lightning and a bowl of soup…I know, I’m a bit of a retard…but at least I admit it ).

It never fails to amaze me the sort of connection we have with the universe around us if we go way, way back in time

Anyways, I think people are adverse to cloning because it might one day result in human cloning (or are we actually cloning humans already? I’ve no idea). And they’re adverse to that thought because we believe ourselves unique. Being able to make replicas of ourselves would mean we’re dispensable and replaceable I guess. Then there’s the ethical issues of tampering with human subjects. Throw religion into the mix and we have a riot.

Btw, I’m glad you tagged Kafir Girl for the meme thingy…else I wouldn’t have come across your blog

Yep, parthenogenesis is pretty much exactly like cloning yourself. Speaking of which, I never really understood people’s adversness to cloning. If we can work out the kinks of the process, it’s nothing weird - happens in nature all the time. Identical twins are clones!

Second question is trickier, but a very good one. I actually don’t really know, and as far as I’m aware, no one does… but then that’s the case for the evolution of the sexes as well so I suppose that’s no excuse for me not to at least try to answer.

First of all, the main division of different types of cells isn’t that of plants and animals, but between prokaryotes (cells with no nucleus) and eukaryotes (cells with a nucleus and other membrane-bound compartments like mitochondria). The first cells were most likely very much like bacteria, and it stayed that way for a very, very long time. Life first appeared about 3.8 billion years ago, and eukaryotes probably didn’t turn up until about 2 billion years ago!

The appearance of eukaryotes, the life-forms that would eventually evolve multicellularity, probably had something to do with a process called endo-symbiosis. Possibly some prokaryotic cells had a habit of engulfing and digesting other cells, and at some point, they stopped digesting. If such a cell engulfed a photosynthesising cyano-bacterium, that bacterium could live inside the cell, and eventually “devolve” into a chloroplast. Something similar happened with mitochondria. Radical theories suggest that this is what happened with all the organelles (membrane-bound compartments) in eukaryotic cells.

After this, another billion year passed, and my guess is that different kinds of eukaryotic cells probably specialised during this time. Some, the ones that were good at photosynthesis, developed hard shells (cell walls) and stopped moving about, whereas others became more motile. Others, related to the motile ones, must have developed whatever odd qualities that led them to evolve into fungi.

And then multicellularity turned up and things get really interesting and just a bit less hypothetical.

So anyway, to try to summarise my answer, I’d say that the first plant and animal cells were distinguished by whether they had “swallowed” photosynthesising endosymbionts or not. But they didn’t actually turn into the multicellular plants and animals we think of today until much, much later.

So is parthenogenesis sorta like cloning yourself? Since it’s the exact same genetic make-up?

Also, I’m wondering, at which point in evolution did living cells become plant and animal?

My knowledge of biology is basic at it’s best, so I hope you’ll be patient with me

…when the environment is stable, you don’t NEED your offspring to be diverse…

Ah. But what if the environment changes? Then we won’t be able to adapt. Of course, by then we’ll be growing babies in test tubes. (sigh) My half of the species will just fade away. (It is, too, sad!)