Column link
I haven’t any comment on the column per se, just wanted to bring an apparent typo to your attention before the Teeming Millions peruse it. In the third graf we find:
While the term “lifehell” has interesting philosophical implications, I suspect Cecil missed his period, so to speak, and that there should be a full stop after life.
Is Cecil getting a little more ribald or is it my imagination?
Examples include the aforementioned lifehell and this:
Lifehell lost its em-dash somehow (we can safely blame little Ed). It has now been fixed.
A search of the archives shows 12 hits for “shit” going back to 1974, though in some cases it’s not Cecil but his correspondents who use the word.
Just a comment…an intersex individual who impregnanted him/herself and gave birth was used in a Dean Koontz novel.
Supposedly the mother did major league 'shrooms and such that messed up her DNA, so her children were born with special abilities.
It was one of his more entertaining reads.
Also unrelated to the substance of the column: the illustration is now one of my favorites. Sybian + fleshlight + peristaltic pump = Vitro Vac-n-Pump!
I was surprised that sharks weren’t mentioned.
The Robert H. Heinlein short story “–All You Zombies–” also covers some of the same ground, with a clever time-travel twist. Jeffrey Eugenides’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex is also worth a read.
For some people, “Go fuck yourself” isn’t necessarily an insult.
Usually the primordial organ precursors that become either testes or ovaries both become one, both become the other, or don’t quite manage to become either.
It is vanishingly rare (i.e, not sure it’s EVER happened) that someone is born with 2 testes and also 2 ovaries. I mean, in a world of blue-eyed and brown-eyed people, you do get a few people whose eyes are a mixture of blue & brown, or whose left eye is blue and whose right eye is brown, but it’s a massively different thing to be born with four eyes (two blue, two brown), if you see what I mean.
It’s pretty damn rare that someone has one of each and both the boy-equipment and the girl-equipment are in working order.
“xerox copy”? Someone’s getting a letter from a lawyer.
Cecil mentioned earthworms in the midst of the “hermaphrodite mating with itself” essay. Maybe more research has been done since I studied annellids a long time ago. Back then, the accepted answer was that an earthworm, though it makes both eggs and sperm, does not mate with itself. Two earthworms come together, heading in opposite directions so the male parts of each align with the female parts of the other. They secrete a mucus-like sheath around themselves. They both put out eggs and sperms, and then they leave. The sheath is left behind, and if no predators eat them first, that’s where the young hatch. If the worms exchange phone numbers and pleasantries, it’s not in the research.
On an individual worm, the male and female parts are not close together, as they are on an intersex human.
I love the phrase “ignorance intervention”
So, what, you don’t think there are any single parents struggling to make ends meet among the worms?
It should also be noted, by the way, that due to chromosome mixing, any child of a self-impregnated hermaphrodite would not only not be a clone, but would have all the same problems (at least) as the product of a brother-sister incestuous union-- e just wouldn’t have as much genetic variety as es parent. Worse, if it somehow happened in a single-genome hermaphrodite, rather than a chimera.
Finally, it should be noted that in the case of Heinlein’s “All You Zombies”, there was a certain degree of medical intervention, to get the appropriate organs at least into the right shape.
"Another case involved a close local election in Salisbury, Connecticut, in 1843, when one Levi Suydam applied to vote as a Whig. The opposition objected, claiming Levi was female — women wouldn’t get the right to vote for another 80 years. Doctors called in to scrutinize the hanging chad, as it were, found Levi had a mix of sexual equipment but decided he was mostly male."
I like the “hanging chad” reference. 
But I’m curious how they even knew he might be a mix if to all outward appearances he seemed to be a man.
Also, if I understand my genetics correctly, it should be pointed out that even two identical individuals would not produce an identical offspring should such a thing be possible. Since two copies of each gene has to be tranfered to the offspring and one randomly selected copy comes from each parent, then in some cases where the gene set is heterozygous (is that a word) the offspring would result in a homozygous pair. Inevitably, the result is a reduction in the number of genes available to the offspring.
It was always my understanding that this was essentially the reason incest had a higher probability of developing rare genetic disorders.
No, I don’t. Earthworms aren’t exactly the cleverest critters in the bait shop, and they’re not on the top of the stack of species that researchers are eager to study, in depth. Just as in many species, millions of individuals live and die without producing any offspring. By dumb luck, enough successful eggs hatch to outweigh the failures.
Considering the limited sensory abilities of the earthworm, it’s amazing any of them manage to find each other and mate.
The child would not be a clone, due to meiosis - for each of the 26 chromosomes each sperm and egg contains a randomly selected copy of one of the parent’s two chromosomes. So the chances of a zygote forming with the same 52 chromosomes as the parent are extremely small.
Furthermore, the process of chromosomal ‘crossing over’ makes the prospect of a clone virtually impossible.
I stated this in the sticky up top but I’m not sure that anyone is going to notice up there. I noticed that there were no references in this column. Ed states above that there will now be references. Understandable that it will take a long time for the old articles (if it is even possible) but I don’t understand why it isn’t happening in the new ones. Not a big deal to me but I was curious.
I’ve noticed that it sometimes takes a few days after a new column is posted before the list of sources is added. The print version of the column that appears in newspapers does not include the references, so it’s something that has to be added specially for the online version.
That makes sense. It didn’t bother me but I noticed it since I had recently read the sticky by Ed. I have not lived where I can get the print version in 20 years.
While I thought Cecil’s answer was generally on the mark, I did find a couple comments problematic. I’m currently a Women’s Studies student, and as part of my course work, I’ve had to study intersexuality. This is me being nitpicky; Cecil did pretty much give the right answer.
Intersexuality is more common than one in 5,000 as Cecil says. According to Anne Fausto-Sterling in her book Sexing the Body, approximately 1.7% (so, 1 or 2 people in every 100) of live births are intersexed, and this approximation is likely an underestimate due to confidentiality, denial, and ignorance.
And, finally, earthworms are hermaphroditic, but they don’t autofertilize. They reproduce sexually; they simply can either fertilize or be fertilized. You still need two worms to get more worms, but you don’t have to worry about whether or not the two worms are of different sexes because they’re not male or female (or, one could argue, they are simultaneously male and female, but those are categories we’re imposing on nature).