Questions about genders ... male/female

[The Grand Nudger]

LOL, yes, they must've, because your non-argument demands it! Don't you think it's a bit too much for you to make such demands of the cosmos? No...no, of course not. Why would you? It was built specifically as your playground, a sandbox for your every aborted thought.

[tantric]

Oh good grief, *hundreds* of papers have been written about it. They've even run experiments with species that have both sexes and hermaphrodites. And BTW, the male/female thing is mostly for land animals. Lots of ocean fish don't work that way - like ribbon eels or clownfish. Stuff like asynchronous hermaphrodites (animals that are born male then turn female). Not to mention plants, and then fungi, which are + and - instead of M/F. Or you could look here, in wikipedia. There was recently a paper published that showed how primroses that use sexual reproduction don't accumulate harmful mutations.

First off most fish are either male or female, whether they live in salt or fresh water. Secondly I of know of the strange nature of reproduction with some animals, but the real question remains sexual reproduction is complicated and the two sexes would have to evolve at the same exact time in all their complicated needs or poof.

GC

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You started a question for which no one has an answer and have since failed to realize that there is no importance whatsoever in having done so. It's trivially easy. Why did I mix my whiskey with ginger ale, that you can;t answer means "therefore no god".

Now you're just being stupid or you've had to much to drink.

GC

Okay, try again. Imagine a world without sex, where all animals are hermaphrodites. When they mate, they exchange gametes and both become pregnant and eventually bear young. Each one benefits the same - let Y for young be the benefit of having kids. Now there's a cost to pregnancy - the organism has to eat more and is less fit and capable of surviving while pregnant. There's also a cost to fertilizing another organism, just giving gametes, but this is MUCH less costly than being pregnant and having young. So, let F for female be the cost of being pregnant and M for male being the cost of producing sperm and impregnating another. Just as an estimation, we might say that 100M = F, or that it takes a hundred times as much energy to carry and bear young than it does to just drop a load and go. With me? If we have two creatures, A and B, that are both hermaphrodites, the cost of producing a new generation for both is Y - (F+M) - the benefit of having young less the cost of producing sperm and carrying the young. Now, suppose that B is a mutant - instead of carrying the young, it just miscarries every time. So, when A and B mate, the net for A (the hermaphrodite) is Y-(F+M), but for B it is just Y-M. Considering that M is 1/100th of F, the benefit to B is HUGE...but you can't have a species of all males, so when B passes on his genes, if he does so in a manner so that all his kids are males.....there is no third generation. It is in B's best interest to sire a generation that has as many females as possible...It is possible to construct mathematical models of this and run it through a computer - trust me, I've done it, and it works. You can also show why some species reproduce every year and why some reproduce once and die - it's math. The textbook for this class was called "The Theoretical Biologist's Toolbox" and it involve learning a truly heinous programming language called 'R'. But it's basic coursework for graduate level ecology and evolutionary biology students and not at all a mystery. Despite all this, I prefer to believe in something completely different, as explained in the song "The Origin of Love" by Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It has gods and supernatural stuff in it, but is also fairly reasonable, so maybe that will work for you.


Hmmm, teaching and discourse rather than insults....

[Regina]

Girl wut?



In a cultural sense, sexual reproduction has very little to do with "gender". Having a penis or a vagina is more related to your sex.

This confuses some people, but think of it as "sex is physical, gender is mental". Your gender is your identity, so it is possible to be biologically male while seeing yourself as female or vice versa (which would make you transgender)

[JuliaL]

We are currently in the biology unit ... and I've pondered this question from an atheistic evolutionary viewpoint for a bit ... and I can't seem to find an answer.

So, I thought I would post here to see if you all could offer some insight.

Why do we only have two genders, male and female? [excluding asexual animal reproduction] ... just humans and almost all animals? Why only two? Why not ... say ... seven, or seven-thousand? If we have evolved over time from a single celled organism ... why did we only evolve into two genders and not more? Why did it stop at two? Thanks for your time.

The atheistic evolutionary view on the development of sexual reproduction differs little from a specifically deist theistic view.
Deists (god exists, but is not immanent)
use the same data as atheism (insufficient evidence to believe that god is immanent whether it exists or not)
and find the same conclusions.
The other bajillions of kinds of theists each have their own wacky origin myths which obviously differ from the above. Their individual differences are too many and varied to mention here, involving as they do such things as flecks of mucus from the Great Green Arklseizure.

Why two? As others have laid out, because, on balance, it works well enough to have led to us. We are not an optimized system, rather we are a system which is constantly being optimized to its local environment by natural selection acting on our current varied states. Why not more? Because the zillions of individual events on the evolutionary path to us did not, on balance, lead to more. Two was good enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_o...production

I think the real question is how could evolution come up with both sexes before the organism winked out of existence

You should really try to educate yourself, if only in order to know your enemy.
Sex evolved at a time when multi-cellular organisms were just getting going.

All sexually reproducing eukaryotic organisms derive from a common ancestor which was a single celled species.

-Wikipedia op cit.

The species that invented sex essentially didn't have male and female, it just exchanged genetic material with another individual externally indistinguishable from itself. Male and female only became identifiable when individuals of a (much later) species gradually differentiated into two classes, one of which specialized in making larger, more robust, but more costly reproductive cells and one which did the opposite; making smaller, less costly, but more vulnerable reproductive cells.

[bennyboy]

In a cultural sense, sexual reproduction has very little to do with "gender". Having a penis or a vagina is more related to your sex.

This confuses some people, but think of it as "sex is physical, gender is mental". Your gender is your identity, so it is possible to be biologically male while seeing yourself as female or vice versa (which would make you transgender)

"Gender" comes from "genus," with "gen" being Latin for "coming to be; create." The book of "Genesis" is about the creation of the world. An electric "generator" creates electricity. "Genetic" material is DNA, the code of the creation of an organism, not a tube of lube or a strap-on.

Nobody is "confused." Everyone knows how babies are made-- male + female + alcohol = new person. Now, some people care less about the baby-making and more about the identity of traditional "male" and "female" traits, either physical or stereotypical role-based, and about the freedom to intermingle those traits into something wonderful and new. It's beautiful that our society allows people to do that. But the word "gender," scientifically, classes the reproductive role of a given organism, and this thread is in the science subforum.