KC

Frankly, I dont see how resricting yourself to mammals helps you in any way. What is it about mammals that makes the haploid/diploid gene situation any different from that of hymenoptera, if all you are concerned with is completeness of a genome?

KC

zwi

KC posted This has gotten rather tendentious, which I didnt want it to be, and wish to let the subject drop if it upsets people

You see, when I made my initial posting I started off "in Mammals" precisely because I knew about haploid/diploid organization in certain insects and also in certain pines or ferns, but I purposely didnt want to get into that distracting argument
Others brought it up and it did distract

I think that the series of bases that constitutes a chromosome in a gamete has a certain subtle difference from the series found in a somatic cell The difference is tiny but to me at least it is conceptually important

The full genome available in a human gamete is not enough to create an independent baby

Apart from the alleged case of Jesus Christ a haploid human is not capable of independent existence. It needs the contribution of a complementary series of bases from another individual

In a somatic cell (apart from accumulated copying errors) the information in the DNA is theoretically sufficient to duplicate another human being Hence the possiblity of reproductive cloning, and of the existence of the title character of this thread, Dolly the Sheep

Folks, in restricting my remarks to mammals I am not suggesting that insects or pines and haploid creatures in general are inferior


Zwi

pz

Using that example, the diploid genome is also insufficient to create an independent baby.

The main reasons a haploid genome doesn't work in metazoans are 1) dosage problems and 2) hemizygous lethality. It's not really a problem of missing genetic information. Some species can do surprisingly well with a haploid genome: the zebrafish Danio rerio can develop well into the larval stage as a haploid.