Making Natural History in Public: MEN update _____

Magritte Nankin

In beginning to organize my conversation and to specify what it is I specifically want to talk about, I have found these articles and web pages. Because my project utilizes animals sexual dimorphism to expand humans understanding of sex and its relationship to the body, I thought it would be appropriate to address Darwinian concepts of sex and gender. Being a Darwinian society, the Darwinian concept lingers that human and animal sexes, sexualities and sexual expressions are similar . "It's difficult to tell just how many exceptions there are to the rule because observations may have been skewed by Darwinian biases.” Observing this situation I have chosen to investigate anthropoid and Aves sexing or sexual determining comparatively to humans. In Sex Determination and Sexual differentiation in the Avian Model by Justin Chue and Craig A. Smith they state that “Evidence from gynandromorphic chickens (male on one side, female on the other) points to the likelihood that sex is determined directly in each cell of the body, independently of, or in addition to, hormonal signalling.” Hence, sex-determining genes may operate not only in the gonads, to produce testes or ovaries, but also throughout cells of the body." In Gynandromorphs and Intersexes, the cumulative authors suggest, “Gynandromorphs (i.e., sexual mosaics) are genetically chimeric individuals consisting of male and female tissues. On the other hand, intersexes are genetically uniform (i.e., complete male, complete female or intermediate in every tissue) but all or some parts of their tissues have either a sexual phenotype opposite to their genetic sex or an intermediate sexual phenotype.” Using these ideas to challenge serotypes through the presentation of varied forms of morphology, such as cases of Mosaicism and Chimerism, The expression of sex and the associations humans in western culture have to them will be expanded.