It is easy, in retrospect, to understand that the dynamics of this form of cell division could not possibly be the same as that of mitosis: it’s a matter of elementary mathematics. In mitosis, you’ll recall, the parent cell and the daughter cells end up with the same number of chromosomes. You start, say, with forty-six (the number of chromosomes in human cells); the chromosomes duplicate (ninety-two), and then each daughter cell gets half: back to forty-six.
