These biologists are holding out on me.

I’ve been writing about biology for quite some time now, and sometimes I think I’ve got a pretty good sense of the scope of life. Neurosurgeon wasps–got it. Eels with alien jaws–check. And then I stumble across something new, or should I say, new to me.

This week’s revelation is androgenesis. Androgenesis is what happens when kids get all their genes from their father. Normally humans and other animals produce offspring by combining DNA from both mother and father, an arrangement that’s often the case in plants as well. Both sperm and eggs only get one of the two copies of each chromosome in the genome. When male and female gametes combine,