Caster Semenya, woman who rocked athletics world, ‘is hermaphrodite’ Hermaphrodites…?
…here ask for surgery. Should they?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/more_sport/athletics/article6829813.ece
(Being hermaphrodite is a huge evolutionary advantage. Successful species like slugs and snails can decide which sex they are, when they meet another attractive member of the same species.
I’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous!)
Sex tests carried out on Caster Semenya, the world 800 metres champion, show that she is a hermaphrodite, a source close to the case claimed tonight.
If the allegation is backed up by the results, the South African may well find herself stripped of her gold medal and banned from racing. The IAAF, the world governing body, refused to comment on the claim tonight, but earlier in the day its general secretary, Pierre Weiss, said: “It is clear that she is a woman but maybe not 100 per cent.”
July 12th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
“Being hermaphrodite is a huge evolutionary advantage.” – not if you’re a human.
An evolutionary advantage is a heritable genetic predisposition that increases your evolutionary fitness. Evolutionary fitness is measured by reproductive success – how many kids you have that grow up and have their own kids. But hermaphroditism is not necessarily heritable. Hermaphrodites may have androgen receptor mutations or congenital adrenal hyperplasia, these are not traits that are particularly heritable nor are they favored by reproductive success. Hermaphrodites and pseudo-hermaphrodites make up about 1% of the population and population genetics tells us that they will always be a part of our populations (at low frequencies), so they will always present problems for societies that only acknowledge male/female/heterosexuals.
Human Hermaphrodites
http://8e.devbio.com/article.php?id=266
Report this comment
July 20th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
I have news for you. This isn’t news. About 1.5% of births have some gender anomaly– the X and Y chromosomes are somewhat prone to breaking and recombining and duplicating, leading to all sorts of small to large variations in gender. So whatever this person has is not rare– it’s just been spotlighted.
And it’s not and advantage! Usually for these folks the sexual organs are not quite all there. Not an advantage at all.
Report this comment