Biologists have managed to reprogram stem cells taken from a male mouse into female oocytes, then fertilized them with sperm from another male mouse, and produced healthy offspring — that is, they’ve made mice with two fathers. This is an expected, incremental advance in stem cell research, and not surprising at all.
The creationists at Answers in Genesis are made somewhat uncomfortable about this, since it violates their fantasies about the rigidity of sex determination, and recruited their tame in-house crank with a Ph.D., Nathaniel Jeanson to write a rationalization for them. It’s pathetic. He correctly summarizes the basics of the procedure, but then his brain falls out.
He decides that what he just described didn’t happen.
But can two adult males (mice, in this case) have their cells reprogrammed to produce eggs? Don’t males normally produce sperm, not eggs? How can offspring be produced from “two dads”?
In short, they can’t.
But that’s what the experiment did: they reprogrammed cells from adult males to produce eggs. His little essay described exactly what they did, which was that. How does he suddenly backtrack on everything?
For two males to reproduce, you have to first convert the cells from one of the males into female cells. And no, I’m not talking science fiction. This is what the researchers actually did.
They first reprogrammed cells from both male mice back to an embryonic state. At this stage of the process, the cells were all still male—possessing both an X chromosome and a Y chromosome. Then they waited for cells from one of the males to lose their male genetic material—the Y chromosome.4 At this stage, these genetically deficient cells now possessed only a single X chromosome, no Y chromosome.
These genetically deficient cells were poor candidates for producing eggs. To produce eggs, you need cells that have two X chromosomes. Consequently, as a next step, the researchers chemically induced these genetically deficient cells to return to a “normal” genetic state. They chemically forced them to have two chromosomes again—to realize an XX (rather than XY) chromosome state.
Effectively, they deleted the genetic instructions for “male” from one line of reprogrammed male cells, turning them genetically into female cells. Voilà, now they could produce eggs.
Yes? They took cells from a male mouse and turned them into female cells that could differentiate into eggs. They produced offspring from two dads. In short, they can.
It’s only been done in mice, and it’s a long, long way to being repeatable in humans, but this is exactly the procedure two gay men could use to have children together. Jeanson wants to argue, though, that the male mice did not have children — instead, he produced a “daughter,” a single cell, that then produced offspring.
By the way, if this strikes you as impossible, consider the fact that adult males regularly produce females. Dads have sons and daughters. Normally, these females (daughters) are produced with the help of a woman. In this study of two “dad” mice, the female “offspring” were produced in the culture dish—in a process that, in some respects, resembles the process of cloning.
So, no, two “dads” did not sire offspring together. Instead, using new genetic tools and tricks, researchers bypassed the normal process of reproduction to turn male cells into female cells and then joined the resulting sperm and egg.
Thus, even these researchers could not circumvent the biological realities for gender that God hardwired into creation from the beginning. They just went about the process of reproduction in a more perverse way.
By this goofy reasoning, no adult is a parent — we only produce spermatogonia/oogonia, single celled precursors to gametes, that are the actual parents, and mommies can be nothing but a transient single-celled stage on the way to making a zygote. Those “hardwired” “biological realities” seem to be entirely circumventable, although only with considerable technical finagling. Or, if you prefer, we could argue that his god has incorporated some remarkable flexibility in how sex develops.
I mean, seriously, two daddy mice did have offspring together. That’s the simple blunt reality of this result.
Get used to it.
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(@thebadstats) 
