Author: Christopher Gonzalez

1. The reproductive cycles of certain lizards.
2. Under certain conditions, external or internal, certain species of lizards or perhaps all of them have the ability for the females of said species to reproduce without the need of a male to fertilize their eggs.  This strange thing that female lizards can do seems to be a response to certain conditions found within their environments.  If there happens to be a lack of males to mate and fertilize eggs with, as a survival strategy to ensure the safety of the population of their species, female lizards will still lay eggs that hatch into fully formed and healthy newborn lizards.  These newborns are direct clones of the lizard that laid the eggs and thus are all females.
3. I want to what species of reptile or lizard have this ability to procreate without sexual reproduction, what are the conditions necessary for this event to occur, why does it happen, is it a safe and effective means of prolonging the survival of a species, how did this ability come about to begin with and when did lizards and other organisms gain the ability to reproduce asexually?
4. So apparently, it has been discovered thus far that about 70 species of vertebrates have this ability to reproduce asexually from a process called parthenogenesis, and it isn’t limited to only lizards.  The offspring are usually direct clones of their mother, but the organisms do have a way of producing genetically diverse offspring without the aid of a male.  During the cellular division process called meiosis, the daughter cells acquire twice the usual amount of chromosomes and are able to get a full set of chromosomes from two sets of pairs derived from the mother.  This allows the offspring to be fully genetically diverse from the mother it was born form and thus protect the population’s genetic diversity.
5. I still want to know how these few vertebrates gained the ability to reproduce asexually, when did this occur, and what are the trigger conditions for this event to take place.  Why is this ability to asexually reproduce present in several species of vertebrates that don’t have any relation to each other, and why do so few in general have the capacity to do this?

When James Baldwin says, “The world is larger,” I believe he means to say that there is so much more that exists beyond the scope of what you can simply see right in front of you and around you.  The majority of people live for many years, or their whole lives, in a very small portion of the world.  A neighborhood consisting of a few blocks, in which they become accustomed to.  Soon enough, this neighborhood becomes their “world” so to speak. Everything that happens in this neighborhood becomes a part of their lives and learning experience, the information gathered from these experiences become what these people believe life in general just is.  If a boy were to grow up his whole life in a crime-ridden project area of New York City, being poor all the time and never being able to do anything for himself because he doesn’t have the means to, then he will believe that the world is a cruel and unforgiving place.  He will believe that life is horrible and that that he is going to suffer like this for the rest of his life because this is the only information that he has ever been exposed to for his whole life.  The reality is, the world is in fact very cruel, but also very loving.  It contains all kinds of experiences and things, good and bad, that this boy will never get to experience because he doesn’t have the means to leave this small part of the world he was born into.  Reality, for many people, only consists of these small portions of the world that they are confined to, they cannot conceive anything outside of it because they have never seen it before and so the rest of the actual world might as well not exist at all.

I wish I had been taught the actual realities of life in school.  School lied to me when it taught me that the way forward was doing all this book work and then going to college to get a degree and then get a job in my field of studied expertise.  It’s not that simple, things get in the way, and things in my life changed and I was in no way prepared for that.  There were variables in my life I had no control over and I was never taught how to cope with them.  School teaches you how to be book smart, not street smart.  It gives you basic information that most likely will end up being useless in your life and doesn’t give you actual life skills that will prepare you for the world outside of the confines of its walls.  It’s very restricting, and the school system needs to teach kids from an early age how to prepare to become adults by giving them actual specialized skills that they can use to live life on their own after they graduate.

Hello professor, this is Christopher Gonzalez from your Tuesdays and Thursdays class at 2:15pm, I hope you are well.  I am messaging you today because I would like some assistance in formulating my paragraph structuring so that the focus of the essay is clear and concise without losing focus and getting too lost in any one idea.  Please message me back at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,

Christopher Gonzalez