gwern comments on Can the Chain Still Hold You? - Less Wrong

108 Post author: lukeprog 13 January 2012 01:28AM

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Comment author: HungryTurtle 10 February 2012 06:56:30PM 0 points [-]

Foucault would call it biopwer if you like that term better, but it is essentially breeding. The reason it is not as effective as a geneticist in their greenhouse is the scale. Even if a government has a policy of "fixing" hermaphrodites, the reality of actualizing that over a territory the size of a kingdom/country is almost impossible.

Is that a sufficient explanation why they haven't been completely wiped out? Check my facts on this, but I think about 1:3000 people is born not male or female.

Comment author: gwern 10 February 2012 07:15:54PM 3 points [-]

...or it could just be that extremely complex systems like gender unavoidably go haywire during fetal development or a mutation hits, and this results in a normal background rate of around 1:3000?

Comment author: MC_Escherichia 11 February 2012 04:53:15PM *  4 points [-]

Yes, that seems reasonable. There are four biologically possible scenarios I can think of to explain the numbers:

  1. It's developmental noise.
  2. Mutations that cause hermaphroditism arise at a certain rate and are eliminated by natural (or artificial) selection at a certain rate; this is mutation-selection balance.
  3. Multiple genes at different loci are required to produce a hermaphrodite (this is epistasis); natural selection doesn't act against these genes since it is rare for them to be found in the same invididual, and they may produce some benefit when apart.
  4. Hermaphrodites have reasonable fitness and are held at an equilibrium frequency in the population.

Four seems far and away the least likely; I'd be suspicious of an equilibrium that's so low, not only in our species but all our mammalian relatives. Perhaps there are answers in the literature; I don't have the time.

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