Vague, campy biological/spiritual question

[Zylka]

Is a human being more the product of the sperm, or the egg? Does it change for gender? Huh? Wh

[Edan]

Not sure how to answer a post that appears to be cut-off in mid-post, but as for gender:

IIRC, both the sperm and the egg donate a single chromosme - the human being is male if it has recieved a Y-chromosome from the sperm. A male has an X and a Y chromosome. A female has two X chromosomes. Therefore, the donation of the sperm determines the gender. Someone will (hopefully) correct me if I'm wrong.

[Zylka]

So the sperm is the catalyst and the egg becomes the human

[Zylka]

Wh

[Anodyne]

This post should need a smiley with eyes going like , mouth open, and small little snakelike hands waving like psychedelic weathervanes, and didgeridoo playing in the background.

[orange]

for some weird reason I was thinking about this today. Is it the sperm that carries the soul, the egg, or the combination of both (in religious/spiritual thought)

In other words, would I have the same 'soul' that I do now if it was any of the millions of sperm that it could have been, or would each of them give me a different soul, or does the egg not matter, or do both?

[CapitanGarlic]

Depends on what you believe a soul is. That's one of the most relative things I can think of.

[Dis]

The recent article in Discover magazine had a story about how there are people born with ambiguous sex organs. Basically 1 in 2000 people are born this way.

Of course this probably does not relate at all to what you are asking.

But my response just illustrates that human beings are the product of sperm and egg, but sometimes the natural process screws up.

[Lord_Davinator]

the sperm is sort of a catalyst I guess... the DNA get infused or something and then it starts builing up cells around it that eventually accumulates to a baby... as for gender... the DNA chormosomes decide that... I think is a 2/3 chance of it beign a girl and a 1/3 chance of being a guy. I read this shet a couple of years ago so my memory is pretty vague on it

[Dis]

As for soul, I don't believe that comes into being until neurons start firing in the brain.

[Edan]

Originally posted by Lord_Davinator
as for gender... the DNA chormosomes decide that... I think is a 2/3 chance of it beign a girl and a 1/3 chance of being a guy.

Wouldn't that make roughly 2/3rds of the population female? I'm pretty sure that's not right, and that the chance is roughly 50/50.

[Dis]

well a lot of guys out there act like girls. I think this explains the difference

[Buck Birdseed]

Lessee... There are 46 chromosomes, right? 23 pairs. In 50% of individuals (females), the size of the chromosomes contributed by the male and the female are exactly equal, in 50% (males) the sperm contributes 1/4 of a chromosome less. That makes you, Zylka, 49.5% Sperm and 50.5% Egg, unless you count mitochondrial DNA.

[Az]

actually, Buck, to be precise, the sexual chromosomes are not paired and connected like the other once, so "twenty-two pairs and two sex chromosomes" would be more exact.

[Lancer]

The male soul comes from the sperm, the female from the egg. I'm fairly sure about this, I read it in The Enquirer while waiting for the twinkie lady to process her foodstamps. I'm sure you've all met the twinkie lady? Well, according to the enquirer, her soul came from her mother's egg, and mine, from my father's sperm. The enquirer used as its source an alien abductee that picked up on some telepathic communications among the aliens who were disecting a cow with such precision that it couldn't possibly have been done by earthly science, although the rancher is sueing the CIA.