I would think sperm is a cell and not an organism. It only has half the genetic material (23 in humans). I don't think even a zygote is an organism before replication into in an embryo.
Think about it, is a red blood cell a living organism? No. It doesn't even have a nuclues so it cannot reproduce!
I don't really know, think about MRS. GREN.
Originally posted by leestaticit doesn't replicate into an identucal life form, therefore it's not an organism.
Please someone settle this argument for me, is male sperm classed as a living organism?
It's part of the reproductive system of an organism.
Thanks for the question. It helps to clarify what an organism is.
Let's say for a while, that a sperm is an organism of its own. Then these questions arise:
Are there male sperms and female sperms?
How do they reproduce? Sexually or by dividing into two new sperms the way amoebas do?
As an organism inside the human body, are the sperms parasites or are they just symbiotic? Why do they only thrive in the human male body, why not in the female? Or perhaps they do like it in the female body as they escape there whenever they can?
Do they survive when the human body dies, and trying to find a new host?
🙂
Originally posted by leestaticThe strict definition of organism is complex:-
Please someone settle this argument for me, is male sperm classed as a living organism?
1. a form of life composed of mutually interdependent parts that maintain various vital processes.
2. a form of life considered as an entity; an animal, plant, fungus, protistan, or moneran.
3. any organized body or system conceived of as analogous to a living being: the governmental organism.
4. any complex thing or system having properties and functions determined not only by the properties and relations of its individual parts, but by the character of the whole that they compose and by the relations of the parts to the whole.
Recognising that any fool can look the word up in a dictionary, the laymans summary is that whilst an organism CAN be a single cell (i.e. a moneran, or bacterium as we commonly know it), it can never be a gamete (a sex cell, of which a sperm is one variety). This is because a gamete only has half of the genetic material of the fully functioning cell it becomes on fertilisation.
So no, sperm is not an organism. I hope you won the argument 🙂
Originally posted by tomtom232But each is utterly distinct and unique, its particular combination of genes is never represented again. No two sperm would produce the same organism, even if the eggs were all identical.
None are sacred...you can make a new one in less than a minute. 😛
Which they aren't of course 🙂