Only a Bio teacher would think it's funny

... but I am so darn tickled anyway that I've decided to post it up.
From the Straight Dope:

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Dear Cecil:

While sex without reproduction seems like a better goal, I heard that turkeys can actually reproduce without sex. I know they're stupid/primitive, but can this be true? --Rory P., Delores, Colorado

Dear Rory:

You heard right, compadre. Parthenogenesis--reproduction without benefit of sex--occurs spontaneously in a handful of species, most of them fairly simple but some surprisingly complex. The turkey is the foremost example of the latter group, with the virgin birth rate in some breeds approaching 40 percent. Parthenogenesis also occurs in some lizards. The New Mexico whiptail lizard, for example, is a nearly all-female species that reproduces almost exclusively by parthenogenesis, males occurring only rarely. A few years ago a biologist was startled to discover that a snake he'd raised from its second day of life had produced a litter, even though it had never been in the company of a male. Yow, he realized, snakes too can reproduce parthenogenetically! However, as a matter of practical advice, while the virgin birth explanation may satisfy a scientist, I still wouldn't try it with Dad.

Various explanations have been offered for parthenogenesis. It's said that virgin birth becomes more frequent in turkeys if the female is exposed to semen having a low sperm count--second-rate goods, in other words, which may incline the female to think she'd be better off seeing what she could whip up on her own. An alternative thesis, proposed by myself, is that parthenogenesis occurs chiefly in critters too homely for sex to be practical. I mean really, a turkey, with the wattles and all? Or a greenhouse slug, also suspected of propagating itself parthenogenetically? Say I'm a slug and I spot a member of the opposite sex. You figure I'm thinking, "Boy, wouldja get a load of the cloaca on that one"? Uh-uh. More like, "No way am I having sex with that."

Strange though it may seem, parthenogenesis is a phenomenon highly prized by animal breeding experts, because like cloning it would obviate the messy unpredictability of sex and instead produce exact replicas of prize specimens. Useful as virgin birth might be in poultry, it would be even more so in mammals, where you could put the production of grade-A heifers and the like on even more of an assembly line basis than it is already. So far, however, this goal remains but a distant dream, owing to certain peculiarities of the mammalian genome. Fine by me. Think of all the delightful aspects of the reproductive process: menstruation, pregnancy, labor. And the part we're trying to eliminate is sex?

--CECIL ADAMS
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Dear Cecil:
I heard aphids are born pregnant. Is this true? If so, how does it work? --Lilian Wentworth, Silver Spring, Maryland

Dear Lilian:

You think your life is miserable, cucumber, just be glad you're not an aphid. Not only are they born pregnant, they're pregnant without benefit of sex. Not that sex with an aphid sounds like much of a treat. Two things are at work here: parthenogenesis and paedogenesis.

Parthenogenesis, also known as virgin birth, is rare in humans (one known case) but common in insects. The baby bugs, all of which are female, develop from single cells in mom's body. The advantage of this is that reproduction is very quick--none of this flowers and perfume jive--which helps when you've got as many natural enemies as aphids have.

Paedogenesis--pregnancy in the young--speeds up the process even more. "Although the young are not born until the aphid has reached the adult stage," it says here, "their development may begin before she is born while she is still in the ducts of the grandparental generation." Aphids can give birth ten days after having been born themselves. The baby showers must be murder.
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Dear Cecil:

'Scuse me, but ... how do they grow more seedless fruit? --Just askin', Salt Lake City, Utah

Cecil replies:

Guess you can't just plant more seeds, huh? But the fact is, you wouldn't want to plant seeds even if you could. Sexual reproduction, which is mostly what you're talking about when you grow things from seeds, is too chancy. I'll say, you mutter. But if you think you've got problems, talk to a commercial fruit grower. An important function of sex, after all, is to shake up the gene pool. While that lends a certain charming variety to the offspring of us humans, it's not something you want to encourage in, say, a Thompson seedless grape.

Luckily, sex is only one method of propagating a species. There's also asexual reproduction. Aha, you're thinking, so that's how my parents did it. No, smartypants. Asexual reproduction means making copies of the parent plant by means of cuttings, grafting, and so on. The offspring plants have the advantage, from a horticultural standpoint, of being perfect genetic duplicates or clones of the parent plant. So once you've bred the ultimate rutabaga or what have you, you can crank out exact copies unto the hundredth generation. And people do just that. Some grape "cultivars," as human-bred (and often human-dependent) varieties are called, date from Roman times--that is, the plants we have today are exact genetic copies of ones first grown 2,000 years ago.

What I'm telling you is that seedlessness is no big obstacle, plant reproductionwise. Most grape varieties, seedless or not, are reproduced by grafting. Ditto for citrus and fruit trees in general. (Actually I believe they "bud" fruit trees, but let's not trouble ourselves with details.)

So, you think you understand? Time to obfuscate the situation. It's possible to buy seeds that, when planted, produce seedless watermelons. Whence cometh this seed? It's the product of an unnatural union between different varieties of watermelon, resulting in a hybrid that, like many hybrids, is sterile. You plant the hybrid seeds, and you get a plant whose fruit matures but whose seeds are underdeveloped. To make more seed you have to keep mating the mommy and daddy plants. There's a lot more to it than that, but that's about all I can explain without charging you quarterly tuition. Pass me a grape.