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Nothing in biology is really binary anyways. Male and female are just useful groupings because we’re a sexually dimorphic species, but as with anything in natur
by kulahan 1y ago
Nothing in biology is really binary anyways. Male and female are just useful groupings because we’re a sexually dimorphic species, but as with anything in nature, that’s mostly a spectrum anyways, with strong representations at the anchoring ends.
- jenadine 1y agoIn some species, sex is even quaternary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25223127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25223127 (or is it?)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- realo 1y agoThere is a certain degree of muted cynicism in the parent comment that is quite delightful...
- kulahan 1y agoYep, just thought this was an interesting point to go along with the theme.
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- poly2it 1y agoI think the parent was being ironic.
- andoando 1y agoI mean having an X or Y are pretty damn binary. DNA strand has binary pairs (A-T, C-G). The resulting codons have anitcodon pairs. Then within biological functions you have the parasympathetic system vs the parasympathetic system which do opposite things across the whole body, pro vs anti inflmmatory agents, activators vs inhibitors nearly on every level of biology. Its actually rather astounding how much binary pairs play a role from the very core of physics.
- bregma 1y agoWait... you mean everyone with an X chromosome is female? Is it that simple?
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- lagadu 1y agoHaving and X or Y (or even multiple of each, as some people do, XXY and XYY are real, even single X or Y too) is binary, what's not binary is how it doesn't perfectly correlate with the sex (not even getting into gender here) that the person in question belongs to.
- Polizeiposaune 1y agoSingle Y is a lethal mutation -- there are too many genes needed for normal development that are present only on the X chromosome.
- andoando 1y agoSure what I was responding to is "Nothing in biology is really binary anyways". Certainly not everything is binary, we don't have two simple models of all people despite nucleotides having binary pairs, but there is a lot of damn binary in biology.
- EnergyAmy 1y agoXXY and XYY and whatnot are all variations within a sex. Sex is defined by gamete size, females produce the larger gametes and males produce the smaller gametes. In humans, this is binary and immutable.
- Polizeiposaune 1y agoGametes are binary - functional gametes in anisogamous species are either egg or sperm. On the other hand, the XX vs XY karotype (chromosome set) is just very strongly correlated with sex. The master switch for sex determination in humans (and most mammals) is the SRY gene, usually found on the Y chromosome. Its presence or absence determines whether a developing embryo takes the path towards producing sperm or producing eggs. SRY can migrate to the X chromosome (resulting in males with an XX karotype) or can be broken by mutation (resulting in females with a XY karotype, usually infertile because other stages of development of the reproductive system depend on having two X chromosomes).
- tbrownaw 1y agoWhy say it's limited to biology? Even the binary logic in your computer can sometimes get stuck in a metastable state that's neither a 1 nor a 0. It's fundamentally impossible to completely prevent because of how physics works.
- aaaja 1y agoSex is binary in the sense that the two sexes, female and male, refer to the two halves of a system of anisogamous sexual reproduction. Sexual dimorphism in gonochoric species is a different type of thing to this.
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