scigirl

Gen 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (New International Version)

And God did so by giving all the males an X and a Y chromosome, and all the females two X’s. Nice and simple, just according to Genesis. Or. . . . did He?

XX males
A sex reversal disorder occurring in 1 in 20,000 births. Genetically the child is female, but contain a piece of the Y chromosome stuck onto another chromosome. Develops testes and external male genitalia.

XY females
The other sex reversal disorder occurring in 1 in 20,000 births. Genetically child is male, but part of the Y chromosome is deleted or mutated, thus develops ovaries and female genitalia.

Pseudohermaphriditism
Can occur in XX or XY genotypes. Includes masculinized females who often have a large clitoris and labial fusion to form a scrotum-like structure. The most common cause of female pseudohermaphriditism occurs in 1 in 12,500 births. Males have underdeveloped or ambiguous genitalia. One cause, a deficit of 5-alpha reductase, results in a small penis and a blind vaginal pouch, making gender assignment difficult. Another example is androgen insensitivity, occurring in 1 in 20,000 live births. The patient is genotypically a male (XY) but has female external genitalia, a blind vaginal pouch, but no uterus or uterine tubes. Testes are present but often are mistaken for hernias.

Klinefelter Syndrome
Occurrence is at least 1 in 1000 male live births. Child has 47, XXY. Develops as a male but has small gonads, and are nearly always infertile. Many patients have a difficult time fitting into society, apparently because of poor body image.

Turner Syndrome
A female with only one X chromosome (or has two X chromosomes but part of one of the chromosomes is missing). Occurs in 1 in 4000 female live births. Patients have faulty ovaries, a broad chest with highly spaced nipples, and no or underdeveloped breasts. Patients, similar to Klinefelter patients, often have a tough time with social adjustment, and are often sterile.

So – God may have made man and woman, but a whole lot of people “in between.” You might notice the high rates of Turner and Klinefelter’s syndromes (as high as one in one thousand live births!) Why does this occur? Mainly because the X and the Y chromosome are different sizes and have problems lining up during meiosis. You’d think there would be a better way to do this, if your goal was to make “men” and “women” to populate the earth.

Here’s a website with clinical details on how a urologist diagnoses a disorder of sexual differentiation.

http://www.mednet.gr/archives/1999-5/452.html

scigirl

crownboy

scigirl, the problems you listed are all a result of the fall of man from the grace of god. If Adam and Eve had not selfishly ate of the fruit of the tree in the garden of Eden, then this would not be happening. Clearly, god did not originally intend for these disorders to occur, but once "sin" is introduced into the genome, much chaos occured. Just pray and be thankful to god that he has allowed you as a sinner the opportunity to have a personal relationship with him, whether you are afflicted with one of these maladies or not.



(But seriously, excellent post scigirl. )

Albert Cipriani

Yeah SciGirl (or whatever),
And God also said: "I put before you good and evil, life and death, choose wisely."

Just because our morality or our gender may be confused, does not mean that our choices must be too. We can still choose boldly (to borrow from StarTrek) to do and be what we are not so sure about.

God made us male and female. Some moreso and some less so. Yet we must still choose to be male and female. For some, that choice is easy. For others it is not. But the difficulty of the choice only proves all the more that we have a choice. Our choice in these matters is the only way creatures can cooperate with or rebel against their Creator. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

scigirl

Albert (or whatever),

Let me get this straight - God really thought it should be important for us to be male and female (and not somewhere in between), so he made people in between on purpose? Gee thanks, God.

You say "Our choice in these matters is the only way creatures can cooperate with or rebel against their Creator. "

So - what choices does a hermaphrodite have? Oftentimes they are sterile. They cannot function as a male or female as God clearly intended in the Bible (go forth and procreate). So they can pick a sex and dress like it. So what? Their biology and their sex drives are, by NO FAULT of their own, abnormal. Are you saying that sexuality is purely cultural, and not biological? We just choose any sex we want and go with it, and that's ok with God?

How on earth can you claim that these clinical situations are proof that the Biblical God created man and woman separately and distinctly? I just don't get it.

scigirl

Albert Cipriani

Now Now SciGirl,
No need to get yourself worked up into a lather. Alas and alack! But at the end of your tangents, you did say one thing that I can agree with: That you don't. How can I take you seriously when you argue thusly: God can't do anything unpurposefully. When we do something not on purpose, it's called an accident, or a mistake (or perhaps your M.O.) But such is not possible with God. Surely you know this and do not need me to say it. I know you don't believe in God, but you know that this is the belief of those who do believe in God. That being the case, there is no case for an indictment against God on the basis of Him creating an "accident of nature."

God wanted us to see, too. Yet babies are born blind. God said man does not live by bread alone, yet plenty of men are dying for lack of bread alone. Point is, just because some things don't go to plan does not mean that there is no plan.

You ask: To the contrary, it is a mixed bag. Nature and nurture are the two sides of our means of exchange. We squander ourselves through time through via both means.

You ask: I don't. There is no proof that the Biblical God created anything. That's one of the reasons why I am here wrestling with the notion of evolution and trying to find a way to integrate it if I must with a Creator God. -- Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Badfish

Mutations brought on by man, and the fall of man, mankind indulges in practices that sometimes result in DNA mutation.

Hows it going Scigirl? It's me the member formerly known as GTX (or whatever).

scigirl

And that's exactly my point. You can't have it both ways - either God is not all powerful (hence can't create men and women more unambiguously), or He reallly doesn't care that much about the ambiguity.

Imagine if I became the principal of a school and said, "I really want every student in this school to learn how to read, in fact it's a requirement to graduate!" Yet if I purposely gouged the eyes out of 1 in 500 of the students, would you question my original statement of desire? You should. God could have given us the tools by which to be completely man or woman and able to procreate. Instead, he made some of us sterile, some of us androgenous, some of us a-sexual, etc. Why?

Actually, no I don't know the beliefs of theists, nor do I understand them (although I do try to).
Why? He obviously didn't want us to see that bad.

Ok so God set a plan into motion and hoped things would usually go according to it? Well, at the very least he could have made the X and Y chromosomes a more similar length such that nondisjunction during meiosis I for the sex chromosomes does not occur so frequently (more frequently then the other non-disjunctions).

If making unambiguous men and women to procreate was God's plan, he failed miserably. So either, it wasn't really God's plan, or maybe. . . God does not exist as you think He does. I'm sure there are other possibilities but those are the two that pop into my head.

Agreed.

Agreed again.

Ahh, I see. Well I think the existence of hermaphrodites and such other disorders poses a bigger problem than you seem to let on, not only with the Biblical God in Genesis, but also with the whole notion of sexuality as Catholics define it. Good luck in your quest for answers.

scigirl

scigirl

Yes I remember you GTX - how's the lab going? And is your new name related to the Sublime song?

Here's a couple of questions for you:
1) Why do non-human animals have these same types of mutations? Did the naughty A and E punish all the creatures too? If so, WHY?? It doesn't make any sense at all to me why a God would create perfect life, then make it totally and insanely imperfect because of the actions (which He must have known would happen) of one of the species of this creation.

2) Some of these mutations are a direct result of design flaws. In other words - the way in which we develop is inherently risky. Males and females start out in utero with the same basic body plan. Males have rudimentary uteruses, and females have rudimentary penises (in fact our clitoris is just a tiny penis). Depending on the presence or absense of certain genes, one set of organs regresses and the other progresses to be the reproductive tract, leaving remnants of each however. What kind of a system is that, if your design was to specially create man and woman unambiguously? The biological explanation just makes more sense - the program is there, and it is slightly modified to give us a male or a female.

3) So are you saying that these examples I gave above, which were mutated in utero, are innocent children that are being punished by God because of other people's actions? Why not punish the actual sinner? Since these mutations are for the most part random, and not attributed to any action or inaction on the part of the parents, God is distributing justice randomly.

Would you support an overhaul of a judicial system that randomly punished innocents for someone else's crimes? If not, why do you choose to worship a God who acts in this manner?

scigirl

ps418

Also, don't forget about true, genetic hermaphrodites! They're rare, but they do exist. As I pointed out on this thread, there are true hermaphrodite chimeras that literally have tissues composed of both XX and XY cells, descended from two seperate embryos that fused very early in development.

Then there is also androgen insensitivity syndrome, which results from a mutation in the gene coding for androgen receptors. The result is a chromosomal male that may be phenotypically female, complete with breasts and female external genetalia, or phenotypically male, or anything in between, depending upon how severe the loss-of-function of the androgen receptor is. I guess this would fall under Scigirl's XY females category.


Patrick

MrDarwin

Albert, I'm sure you're aware of the Catholic church's acceptance of evolution as one of the tools by which God created life, and in particular mankind. Do you disagree with the teachings of the church?