Half-Male, Half-Female Fowl Explain Birds' Sex Determination

Kanan excerpts from a BBC report out of Scotland: "A study of sexually scrambled chickens suggests that sex in birds is determined in a radically different way from that in mammals. Researchers studied three chickens that appeared to be literally half-male and half-female, and found that nearly every cell in their bodies — from wattle to toe — has an inherent sex identity. This cell-by-cell sex orientation contrasts sharply with the situation in mammals, in which organism-wide sex identity is established through hormones." Kanan also supplies this link to some pictures of the mixed-cell birds.

Comments

Re:Interesting

[RCGodward]

I think this story is for the birds... I'm sorry...

Object-sex-oriented?

[InsertWittyNameHere]

So each cell has it's own this.getSexualOrientation() function.

Whereas mammals have a global static variable where SEXUAL_ORIENTATION = MALE or FEMALE.

This is interesting because I thought we all inherited from a common ancestor. Was sexual orientation not defined in the root class?

Re:Object-sex-oriented?

[FlyingBishop]

In both cases, each cell has its own this.getGender() function.

In both cases, I would imagine the code looks something like this:

class cell {
      int gender; // should really be a bool, need to fix that at some point.
      proteinFactoryBuilder asdf; // find a better naming scheme ... ...

      getGender() { /* I don't really have time to go back and fix this right now, but if I'd known I'd be making multicellular organisms with this shit I wouldn't have put this at the cellular level. Anyway, we're stuck with it, so for now I'm just returning the gender variable and I'll leave it to callers to figure out wtf to do with unexpected output. */
          return gender;
      }
}

Small wonder it's a little more confusing for birds.

Re:Object-sex-oriented?

[Chris Burke]

Don't be silly.

Sex is what you want but can never get enough of.

Gender identity is what lets you pick out cross-dressers and transvestites.

Sexual orientation is how you're oriented during sex, i.e. missionary, doggy style, reverse cowgirl, Saskatchewan Swinging Simian power retrograde style, etc.

n00bs

[DriedClexler]

They're not the first ones to be checking out a nice-lookin' bird and then see from another angle that "she" is really a man.