My favorite examples of how crazy genetics can be is with twinsÂ
I love genetics. Biology is a trip
This is always so cool.
People like to think that genetic inheritance is like a 50/50 split of traits or some shit when in reality it’s like a fucking free for all who gets to take what spot and what traits develop as a result like
The science side of deconstructing the gender binary.
This is a really great article. Without using the words “social construction” it explains how everything we take for granted about “biological sex” and genetics is socially constructed, and thus subject to bias in assumptions, theory and results and is in dire need of re-evaluation.Â
I want to note that the way the sex binary looks like it’s present throughout the animal world is that white scientists have a terrible habit of labeling everything “male” or “female” even when it makes no sense.
Like, by any reasonable metric, bees have three sexes: drone, queen, and worker. Workers are only labelled female because someone couldn’t abide the idea of something not being either one or the other.
And before someone calls “genetics” there are many species where both sexes have the exact same genetics, and even many where individuals can change reproductive capacity at will, and scientists suddenly have no problem calling the ones who grow eggs “female” even though they were “male” two weeks ago.
Some species of mammals reproduce asexually. They have only one sex. It is still called “female” because it makes babies even though one might reasonably ask why even make the distinction when every single individual makes babies just the same.
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Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.
