Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 66 — page 119: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION Now, there are two main ways in which to explain these claims. The first is to state that the investigators are deliberately misleading us, that they are lying. This is a serious imputation against anyone, and even worse against a scientist, so we should exhaust all other possibilities before adopting that view. The second way to explain these claims is to believe that the investigators are them- selves misled, that they are mistaken. This could be the case for several reasons. It might be that a male animal got into and got out of a cage containing a female without the investigator’s knowledge. Frequently in rat colonies, unless very special and expensive cages are used, wild rats get into and out of the female cages. Again it is not unknown for the animal tenders to let a male acciden- tally slip into a female’s cage—and not think it worth telling the scientist in charge of the laboratory. One can go on thinking up accidents of that kind. What it boils down to is, that in no case reported have the females been under constant observa- tion by the investigator— which, after all, would be asking rather a lot! 118 But, even assuming that the laboratory is so well run that accidents of this kind do not happen, there are various other reasons why the ap- pearance of an offspring from an isolated female need not represent a case of partheno- genesis. The obvious answer would be that the female in question is really an herma- phrodite. That, too, would be most interesting, for rarely among higher animal groups can an hermaphrodite func- tion as both male and female. Still, it is a possibility; and it cannot easily be ruled out. You may think that all one has to do is to examine the female to determine whether “she” is hermaphrodite or not. It is not as simple as that. Every higher animal possesses vestigial sex organs of the opposite sex, and itis extremely difficult to prove beyond any doubt that such vestiges are non-functional. All one can say is that the chances of a mammal fertilising itself would appear to be extremely remote. Another possibility is that the offspring of an isolated female is really not an off- spring at all but a sister! It is within the bounds of possi- bility that an identical twin could reach a low stage of development inside the body comiclooks.cormn