angj57 wrote...
As you can see, even on Earth, species can have radically different numbers of chromosomes, ranging from 1 to almost 200. If these numbers don't match up, you have no hope of producing a child.
Uh, not exactly. What it means is that any offspring of such a pairing will have very little chance of being fertile. Still happens though. Rarely, female mules
have been known to breed. And some hybridizations involving differing karyotypes result in fertile offspring:
http://www.springerl...40004254l2n10w/http://www.ncbi.nlm..../pubmed/1060807 Also, in general, this is not as much of an issue for plants. They're much more flexible about the whole chromosome thing.
For instance, a horse has 64 and a donkey has 62. The two can produce a mule, which has 63, but a mule is infertile and incapable of breeding with other mules, so a mule is not a species.
It's
sort of treated as one for classification purposes, though. For example, the formal "species" name for the mule is "E. caballus x E. asinus". But no, not really a species.
Of course, none of this makes the idea of a Tali-Shep baby any less egregiously stupid.
Modifié par didymos1120, 23 juillet 2010 - 05:14 .