totipotent or zygotelike tzfardeah

It's been a while since I thought of Professor Babich at YU - he of the Mabul fame.

Well, he's back at it - this time analyzing the plagues with his ever-keen scientific mind:

The plague of frogs commences with the following, “Aharon stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt and the frog צפרדע infestation ascended and covered the land of Egypt (Shemos 8:2). In this verse the word “frog” is in the singular and Rashi cites a Midrash contending that one frog initially emerged from the Nile River. When the Egyptians struck the frog, it fragmented into many frogs. On the surface, this appears to describe cloning, through which differentiated adult cells become embryonic or totipotent to develop into copies of the original organism. Interestingly, prior to cloning the lamb Dolly, the initial successful cloning experiments, developed in the 1950s by Robert Briggs and Thomas King, were with frogs (Rana pipens)14. With this in mind, and probably pushing a scientific explanation to its extreme, striking the initial frog may have caused shedding of its differentiated epidermal somatic cells, which became totipotent or zygotelike cells, undergoing mitotic divisions to generate multicellular frogs.

Next we should analyze whether Cylons can really clone themselves on Battlestar Galactica.

UPDATE: Seems like both XGH and DovBear have discovered the same article. Don't know if they both stumbled upon my post or found it independently...