Comment by skyberrys

19 hours ago

The chemicals in their nearby environment are what make the embryos develop into Queen bees. It makes one wonder what sort of nearby chemical environments do to human embryo development.

Since human fetuses are usually encapsulated within the womb of an adult woman, they’re far more insulated from arbitrary chemical environments than bee larvae. But of course we know of many cases where chemicals make it through the mother’s body and into the fetus’s immediate environment, affecting its development: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/fetal-alcohol...

  • > arbitrary chemical environments

    Temperature is another factor. IIRC amphibian embryos have to develop in a wide range of temperatures (an egg might be stuck to a leaf), so their cells have many more variants of proteins, where each variant is most-effective in a different temperature band.

    In contrast, a mammal blastocyst or embryo already has the multicellular mother keeping temperature within a narrower band.

    • Yeah, ages ago I read in a book about evolution that mammalian genes are actually simplified (or optimized, if you will) compared to amphibians because we don't have to accomodate as wide of a temperature range due to being warm-blooded and giving live birth.

      I also recall seeing in a documentary that the temperature of crocodile eggs will determine if it's a male or female. Wikipedia seems to back that up:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_dete...

    • Another interesting example is sea turtles, whose eggs are in a relatively stable environment (sand), but its temperature changes year to year. Based on the temperature of the eggs, you see a different distribution of offspring sex.

  • If you think fetal alcohol syndrome is bad, check what the consequences of lead poisoning are, knowing that just about every state has mass-contaminated their population with lead and then refused to help with the consequences.

    You can avoid fetal alcohol syndrome. You cannot realistically avoid fetal lead poisoning.

    • Well you can't really undo lead poisoning. Nor microplastics, etc. Once those have gotten into a population that's just how the population's gonna be. So it makes sense that there's nothing to do about a lead-poisoned population other than stop adding more.

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  • > are usually encapsulated within the womb of an adult woman,

    When are they not? Do you know of some scary experiments where human babies have been gestated outside the womb?

Search keywords alex jones atrazine then jump into the research papers on pubmed to begin the spiral down the rabbit hole