that plant is half the man you are
I'm watching "Mugsy Explains" on "How flowering plants conquered the Earth".
One of the things this presenter does is to blur the distinction between "haploid organism" versus "diploid organism," instead of talking about whether more of the organism's life cycle is spent in a haploid phase versus a diploid phase.
For mammals, nearly all of the life cycle is diploid; only the sperm and egg cells are haploid, and they essentially never divide on their own.1 But for other organisms, there are apparently substantial fractions of the life cycle in both stages. Apparently the chorophytes (green algae) spend 100% of their lives haploid, except for a reproductive stage. Bryophytes, including mosses, spend most of their lives haploid, but they have a diploid reproductive organ that appears sometimes. Ferns and other more vascular plants are mostly diploid, like mammals are.
Worth comparing to e.g. bees, where haploid versus diploid determines gender and fertility.
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What would it look like if there were actually haploid cell reproduction in mammals? You might have a pregnancy where identical egg cells are fertilized by different sperm. I think this would produce twins which are more closely related than other siblings, but not identical. I wonder whether there's a name for that? ↩