{"id":33813,"date":"2014-01-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-21T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.observa.it\/how-science-is-redesigning-the-rules-of-sex\/"},"modified":"2024-05-07T09:40:12","modified_gmt":"2024-05-07T09:40:12","slug":"how-science-is-redesigning-the-rules-of-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.observa.it\/en\/how-science-is-redesigning-the-rules-of-sex\/","title":{"rendered":"How Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex"},"content":{"rendered":"

Published the book “Storia naturale del concepimento. Come la scienza pu\u00f2 cambiare le regole del sesso”, Bollati Boringhieri ed., by\u00a0Aarathi Prasad<\/em><\/p>\n

Despite modern understandings, the belief that females are culpable for\u00a0absurd reproductive failings has never entirely gone away. On a visit to\u00a0Afghanistan in 2010, I learnt of a practice known as baccha-posh, still\u00a0rife in the \"419VoTR-YiL\"<\/a>region. Some families, when they have daughters, but no sons,\u00a0convert a daughter to a boy by dressing them in male\u00a0clothing. In a New York Times<\/em> article that year, investigative journalist Jenny\u00a0Nordberg reported that:<\/p>\n

\u201c…Afghan families have many reasons for pretending their girls are boys, including\u00a0economic need, social pressure to have sons, and in some cases, a superstition that\u00a0doing so can lead to the birth of a real boy… It is a commonly held belief among less\u00a0educated Afghans that the mother can determine the sex of her unborn child, so she is\u00a0blamed if she gives birth to a daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is where one of the most persistent myths of nearly every human society through history comes up against the biology. And at odds with this myth is another, propagated in ancient Egypt, India, and Greece,\u00a0that women could not only be culpable, but also\u00a0redundant for the creation of life. The concept is illustrated well by the Greek playwright Aeschylus, who in 458 BCE, wrote of\u00a0a parent as \u201c\u2026he who plants the seed. The mother is not the\u00a0parent of that which is called her child but only nurtures the new planted seed that\u00a0grows\u201d. Once the idea became fashionable, it was difficult to shift, appearing in medical books until as recently as the mid-nineteenth\u00a0century.<\/p>\n

The great ironies though are these \u2013 with reference to deciding the sex of our children, genetics of egg and sperm tell us that only sperm determine, and determine by somewhat random selection, whether a baby will be born with a Y chromosome, making it male; and\u00a0it is the female of the\u00a0species who has the eggs, which is a package of not just DNA as sperm is, but a source\u00a0of energy for a developing embryo. And this means that any female could,\u00a0in theory, reproduce without a male if these eggs could be induced to grow\u00a0into embryos all on their own.<\/p>\n

Nature has shown on several occasions that\u00a0mutations \u2013 mistakes in the DNA \u2013 have allowed many animals that typically\u00a0reproduced through sex to do without it. While the females continue to create\u00a0new generations of female \u2013 and sometimes male offspring \u2013 no male could\u00a0ever do the same. Because males carry only packages of DNA, but no\u00a0resources to nourish an embryo, all males are utterly dependent\u00a0on females when it comes to passing DNA on.<\/p>\n

In Like a Virgin, <\/em>I explore the ingenious breadth of ways of reproducing without a mate innovated across the animal kingdom, the long history of human mythology around virgin births, and intriguing ambiguous cases from more modern medical literature.\u00a0I also look to current stem-cell, genetic, and reproductive research to ask how what is happening in laboratories today might offer solutions for reproducing in ways that both men, and women, have never before been able to \u2013 for creating and preserving eggs and sperm beyond the reach of our biological clocks.<\/p>\n

Aarathi Prasad<\/strong>, biologist and science writer, is the author of the book Like a Virgin. How Science Is Redesigning the Rules of Sex<\/em>, Oneworld Publications, London 2012.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Published the book “Storia naturale del concepimento. Come la scienza pu\u00f2 cambiare le regole del sesso”, Bollati Boringhieri ed., by\u00a0Aarathi Prasad Despite modern understandings, the belief that females are culpable for\u00a0absurd reproductive failings has never entirely gone away. On a visit to\u00a0Afghanistan in 2010, I learnt of a practice known as baccha-posh, still\u00a0rife in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[475],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-475","description-off"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex - Observa Science in Society<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.observa.it\/en\/how-science-is-redesigning-the-rules-of-sex\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex - Observa Science in Society\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Published the book “Storia naturale del concepimento. Come la scienza pu\u00f2 cambiare le regole del sesso”, Bollati Boringhieri ed., by\u00a0Aarathi Prasad Despite modern understandings, the belief that females are culpable for\u00a0absurd reproductive failings has never entirely gone away. 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