Talk:Fœtus

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A fœtus (or fetus in Americn English) is a kind of parasitic infection of a female's reproductive tract, and with that, someone on this wiki blog has finally written something that I find kind of offensive. And that takes some doing. My hat is off to you. PFoster 15:26, 16 May 2008 (EDT)

Isn't "parasitic infection" of a reproductive tract contradictory? It suggests that reproduction is not the natural function of the tract. Lyra (ميصتنسثه) 15:30, 16 May 2008 (EDT)

How about "gamete-induced tumor"? Cranial Suppository^{pull your head out of your ass} 15:40, 16 May 2008 (EDT)

Its a bit much, but there some fascinating research in biology about the relationship between the foetus and the mother. The foetus generates vastly complex signaling molecules to pull out nutritional resources from the mother. This are way more complex than is needed, and a misbalance between there production and the mothers response leads to all kinds of terrible consequences (such as gestational diabetes). A popular theory looks at the differential value the foetus places on "future" offspring compared to the mother. To the mother all future offspring have the same relative value, but the the foetus they are only have as valuable (at the most) as itself. So the foetus is trying to extract more resources than the mother is willing to give. Leading to an evolutionary arms race between the signal molecules and suppression of the molecules.

An even more interesting aspect is intragenomic conflict between alleles on the parental chromosome versus the maternal chromosome with in the foetus. In species that are at least a little polygamous the parental chromosomes will devalue future offspring more than the maternal chromosomes within the same foetus. You can find evidence of an arms race between resource extracting genes between chromosomes in the same organism. Some fascinating work on cross-species breeding in mice between a relatively monogamous species and a polygamous species really highlights this. I will see if I can dig it up.

So there is something to be said about the way this is described. It of course only tells part of the story but there very much is a parasitic like relationship to some of the foetus/mother interactions. Particularly from the genes of the father! tmtoulouse ^beleaguer 15:40, 16 May 2008 (EDT)