• Question: could there ever be another sex apart from male and female

    Asked by xX_billy_Xx to Vicky, Scott, Jim, Gaia, Adrian on 4 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by elin.xx.
    • Photo: Gaia Andreoletti

      Gaia Andreoletti answered on 4 Mar 2016:

      If your question refers to the possibility of the existence of another gender apart from the normal sex chromosomes (XY for boys and XX for girls) the answer could be yes.
      There are rare cases in which genetic abnormalities might involve the sex chromosomes X and Y.
      Normally, a healthy boy inherits an X and a Y chromosome from his parents while a healthy girl gets two X’s from her parents.
      Abnormalities are the results of variations in the number of X’s in girls and of irregular numbers of either the X or the Y chromosome or both in males. As and example Turner syndrome is a disease in which girls have only one X, Triple-X syndrome occurs in women who have three X’s chromosomes, while Klinefelter syndrome arises in males that inherit one or more extra X chromosomes.

    • Photo: Adrian Buzatu

      Adrian Buzatu answered on 6 Mar 2016:

      There was an episode in the Star Trek series where they imagined a third sex. In the Universe they may be strange types of life with three sexes. But it seems simple and enough to have just two sexes in combining the genes to allow healthy offspring. Three sexes would imply it would require three individuals each of different sex to all mate at the same time (or maybe not at the same time, but close in time). Our current DNA has two strands, one from the mother, one from the father. One would have to have three strands, which is not easily physically. Having two makes it simply, a nice ellipse. It would all be too complicated with three. Nature evolved through trial and error. Found a solution that works (with two sexes), and then did not evolve further from that. But who knows in the future or on other planets …

    • Photo: Scott Lawrie

      Scott Lawrie answered on 7 Mar 2016:

      The book ‘The Player of Games’ by Iain M Banks looks at the social implications of a third sex. They are called ‘Apex’ in that book as they rule both the men and women by being a necessary step along the way of breeding. I don’t know about the genetics or biology of this, but reading about the people interacting with each other was very interesting.

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