Human male and female are phenotypes

May 5, 2005     Dov, in biologicalEvolution

(A) From Scientific American, May 2005, p.22, "His Brain, Her Brain", By L. Cahill :

* "It turns out that male and female brains differ quite a bit in architecture and activity."

* "Neuroscientists are uncovering anatomical, chemical and functional differences between the brains of men and women".

* "Several intriguing behavioral studies add to the evidence that some sex differences in the brain arise before a baby draws its first breath".

(B) Two of the many definitions of "phenotype":

* "The detectable expression of the interaction of genotype and environment constituting the visible characters of an organism".

* "The observable characteristics, appearance or constitutional, of an organism due to the interaction between the genotype and the environment."

(C) I am not well informed in the matters of the subject article but plain common sense, without need to resort to verbiage, suggests that a comparison of organism's male's and female's genomes reveals, or would most likely reveal, a set of expressions of genes of different patterns, evolved in the course of different physiological adaptive demands/preferences of male and female.

end. DH.