Re: Gender determination (wasOT: Re: What? The clean-shaven outnumber the bearded?)

Quoting Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...>:

> > > Human sex is determined by genes: XX = female, XY = male, plus the
> rare
> > > exceptions XXX and XYY.
> >Don't forget XXY.
>
> Drat. Forgot one. And I should have written "chromosomes" rather than
> "genes"
>
> >I've always made jokes about being a YY baby, which would
> >only be possible as a child of a gay couple, though the child
> >would be very messed up for lacking necessary genes found
> >on the X chromosome.  A YY would be a real hunk though...
>
> I remember from my university classes in psyche and biology,  XYYs
> were
> faddishly called _supermales_, and it was asserted that they were given
> to
> unusually high rates of violence. Considering that even now each
> individual
> alive hasn't been genotyped, one wonders what proof they could offer
> for
> this cause-effect hypothesis.
If they had tested a reasonably large number of convicts of violent crimes, and
a reasonably sized test group without such convictions, they could, even if
these samples represented a very tiny proportion of the total population,
probably offer a very satisfying statistical proof. Genotyping the entire
population of the planet would be serious overkill.

(A test of this kind can of course only establish if XYY and high levels of
violence are correlated - not whether there is a cause-effect relationship
either way. Still, XYY causing violence would seem to be the simplest
explanation of a such correlation.

> I'm not familiar enough with gene placement on X chromosomes to even
> guess
> how messed up a YY might be.
Not so much messed up as dead.

                                                        Andreas

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