What We Already Knew

-from "The Week" magazine, April 8, 2005:

No wonder men find women so hard to understand. The newly cracked genetic code of the female X chromosome shows that females are far more genetically "variable" than scientists realized - and far more complex than men. Women carry their genetic instructions on two X chromosomes, while men have an X and a Y. The Y chromosome determines maleness, but science has long kinown that its genes are otherwise fairly inactive. (women have always known this!) That means men are largely the products of one chromosome, the X. But in women, the journal Nature reports, both X chromosomes are chock full of active genes. Each woman is the product of about twice as many genetic instructions as any man. (And as the caption of the photo of a group of women states: "Each is her own enigma.")