By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
When a child comes into the world, the first thing noted is their sex. Is it a boy or a girl? For the rest of their life the most prominent fact about most people is their sex.
Sports, bathrooms, friends, medical charts, and much of their life is segregated by sex. Every society for the last 6,000 years has separated male and female roles and responsibilities.
Males and females had very different places in life and society, and their families expected them to conform to these roles.
The specifics varied, but generally men focused on hunting, farming, and, in general, working outdoors at hard-labor tasks such as construction.
Women’s roles included bearing and raising children, sewing, making clothes, and the basic housekeeping tasks. Marriage between a man and a woman was the norm in most every society in history.
Nonetheless, today, more so than any other time in history, people are questioning if the human sexes are really very different.
Sexual differences have been studied even before Aristotle walked the Earth in ancient Greece. The differences have been studied in many research areas including psychology, sociology, anatomy, biochemistry, cell biology, physiology, histology, and all areas of medicine from disease to immunology. The findings are clear.
Not in one single trait are the averages of males and females identical. Females, on average, ranked higher than males or males, on average, ranked higher than females. Individual females sometimes score higher than the average male, and individual males sometimes score higher than the average female on other traits.
Furthermore, to ignore the differences between males and females can be dangerous. One of many examples that illustrates this fact was the medication Zolpidem (used to treat insomnia), sold widely as Ambien, which I reported on in this column January 25, 2023.
I then noted that for years, only males were tested to determine proper drug dosage. It was then learned that a much higher rate of women taking Ambien were too sleepy to drive safely in the morning.
Research found that, because women metabolized the drug differently than males, women got twice the proper dose. The result was a rash of traffic accidents.
Women who used Ambien had a 61 percent higher probability of a crash over five years compared to nonusers.
A major reason for the variance was due to male and female hormone differences. Another example is women have lower concentrations of alcohol dehydrogenase, the enzyme that breaks down ethanol.
Thus, they became inebriated much sooner than males because it takes them longer to breakdown the alcohol. For this reason, its toxic effects are greater.
The biological difference between males and females is so great that every somatic cell in the body, in all from 37 trillion to 10, 000 trillion, depending on the weight of the person, is different (XY for males, XX for females).
Although red blood cells become enucleated (expel their nucleus to give more room to do their job, i.e. carry oxygen) all other cells, including bone cells, retain their nucleus until the person dies.
Even in death, sexual differences remain. When a human skeleton is found, the first step in identifying the body is to determine the sex.
The sex is often obvious from the bone structure, but if all else fails, chromosomal analysis, and even DNA, can be used.
The next step is to determine who the victim was, and why did he/she die. Murder? Suicide? Accident?
The Judeo-Christian scriptures are very clear about male/female differences. Humans were created male and female, and the female was created to be a compliment for the male. Likewise the male was created to be a compliment for the female.
As Genesis 2:18, 21-24 reads: The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”… So God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, [from his side] God made a woman …. and he brought her to the man. The man said, …; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh [emotionally, intellectually, financially mentally, spiritually, and psychologically].
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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,800 publications in 12 languages and 60 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries.