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Male mice grow ovaries instead of testes if they are missing a small region of DNA that doesn't contain any genes, finds a new paper published in Science.
The study, led by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, could help explain disorders of sex development in humans, at least half of which have an unknown genetic cause.
Mammals will develop ovaries and become females unless the early sex organs have enough of a protein called SOX9 at a key stage in their development. SOX9 causes these organs to become testes, which then direct the rest of the embryo to become male.
Sex reversal following deletion of a single distal enhancer of Sox9 (DOI: 10.1126/science.aas9408) (DX)
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Non-Coding DNA Changes the Genitals You're Born With
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Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @10:51AM (3 children)
I suppose that means that these cures would indeed fit into your narrative. I only used the word narrative because you did. It's cheap rhetoric to call opposing opinions a narrative and pretend your own opinion is something else. And it even doesn't make much sense if you would actually take the trouble to think about it. If the gene mixing you're concerned about produces the capability to turn out homosexual than you can be pretty sure that there is an evolutionary advantage connected to it. Evolution would have filtered it out of the population over the generations if there wasn't. I don't know what it is, but I can imagine it may have a relation to the ability of males to work together with other males rather than just seeing competitors, and the same goes for females. And it's also worth noting that most sex doesn't produce children, a couple that has sex once a week does not produce 52 children a year. Sex has social functions too, such as releasing tension, it's not just about gene mixing.
But don't worry, I don't feel a need to cure your ignorance, so I'll leave it at this.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:46PM (2 children)
> It's cheap rhetoric to call opposing opinions a narrative
It is also correct. You say it yourself, "opinion". Mine were not opinions. This is an opinion: the very choice of word "heterosexual" is doublespeak. This is a fact: heterosexual is etymologically recent and should be defining non-orthosexuals, respecting the traditional dualism between ortho- and hetero- prefixes.
In fact your objection was on one aspect and offered an anthropomorphization of evolution clearly clashing with that other fact, that genetic disorders persist no matter their long term usefulness. Skin that ruptures, anemia, stuff like that. Because their usefulness is potential, under special circumstance (like phobias are), I guess, or because they are unavoidable side effects of variance. So, sorry I reject your objection. All the rest is fluff.
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @02:03PM (1 child)
The word heterosexual originates from Richard von Krafft-Ebing's book Psychopathia Sexualis from 1892, the word orthosexual from William Haver's The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS, 1992. Orthosexual is etymologically far more recent than heterosexual. Did you perhaps mean to say that the word ortosexuals should be defining non-heterosexuals?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday July 04 2018, @08:51PM
The use of ortho and hetero, see orthodoxy, orthography, predates the hetero/homo use.
My argument is that hetero/homo avoids making a judgment on normality, which ortho/hetero would have done, but reverses the connotation of hetero. Not the most straightforward way to express oneself.
On one hand the science is not about judgement, on the other hand it's not a moral judgement and in other cases science makes use of the added connotation, see orthodontics.
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