http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/opinion/20dowd.html?incamp=article_popular_1&p
agewanted=print&position=

http://tinyurl.com/489zw

"Research published last week in the journal Nature reveals that women
are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men
remain the simple creatures they appear.

"Alas," said one of the authors of the study, the Duke University
genome expert Huntington Willard, "genetically speaking, if you've met
one man, you've met them all. We are, I hate to say it, predictable.

------massive mung-------

"We poor men only have 45 chromosomes to do our work with because our
46th is the pathetic Y that has only a few genes which operate below
the waist and above the knees," Dr. Willard observed. "In contrast, we
now know that women have the full 46 chromosomes that they're getting
work from and the 46th is a second X that is working at levels greater
than we knew."

Dr. Willard and his co-author, Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at
the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, think that
their discovery may help explain why the behavior and traits of men
and women are so different; they may be hard-wired in the brain, in
addition to being hormonal or cultural.

So is Lawrence Summers right after all? "Only time will tell," Dr.
Willard laughs.

The researchers learned that a whopping 15 percent - 200 to 300 - of
the genes on the second X chromosome in women, thought to be
submissive and inert, lolling about on an evolutionary Victorian
fainting couch, are active, giving women a significant increase in
gene expression over men.

As the Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, who is writing a book
about human evolution and genetics, explained it to me: "Women are
mosaics, one could even say chimeras, in the sense that they are made
up of two different kinds of cell. Whereas men are pure and
uncomplicated, being made of just a single kind of cell throughout."

This means men's generalizations about women are correct, too. Women
are inscrutable, changeable, crafty, idiosyncratic, a different
species.

"Women's chromosomes have more complexity, which men view as
unpredictability," said David Page, a molecular biologist and expert
on sex evolution at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in
Cambridge, Mass.

Known as Mr. Y, Dr. P calls himself "the defender of the rotting Y
chromosome." He's referring to studies showing that the Y chromosome
has been shedding genes willy-nilly for millions of years and is now a
fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome. "The Y married
up," he notes. "The X married down."