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From: Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] Gender vs. Sex. Culture vs. nature.
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 18:41:50 -0400
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On Tuesday, October 14, 2014 01:02:18 Alexander Kozhevnikov wrote:
> Okay, I actually admit that sometimes one can generalize by wider patches 
> than 'species' - there are many traits common to wider categories, e.g. 
> true for most sea-horses, true for most arachnids, etc. But either way, 
> the point is it's still circular: it's "feminine" in that species because 
> that given species or set of species to which it belongs typically has 
> that trait in their females - but how did we decide such and such was male 
> or female? In some sense we base it on the biology of who produces the egg 
> and who produces the thing that fertilizes the egg... which of course is 
> largely based on what we as humanity found to be common based on taking 
> our existing cultural notions and then figuring out where the underlying 
> differences were in us.

Eggs are bigger than sperm cells. This is true in almost all sexually 
reproducing species. A few produce equal-sized gametes of two types, which are 
not designated as eggs or sperm.

Many animals (earthworms, slipper snails) and plants (roses, figs) have egg 
cells and sperm cells, but either produce both from one individual or have 
ways of being sexual other than simply male or female.

Pierre
-- 
sei do'anai mi'a djuno puze'e noroi nalselganse srera

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