Woman: An Intimate Geography (6 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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to 100,000. What is incontestable, though, is the vastly higher gene richness of the X than of the Y. The male chromosome is a depauperated little stump, home to perhaps two dozen, three dozen genes, and that's the range scientists come up with when they're feeling generous. On the X, we will find thousands of genes, anywhere from 3,500 to 6,000.
What does this mean to us women? Are we the mother load of genes, so to speak? After all, if we have two Xs, and each X holds about 5,000 genes, whereas a man has but one X with 5,000 genes and a Y with its 30 genes, then you don't even need a calculator to figure that we should have about 4,970 more genes than a man. So why on Gaia are men bodily bigger than we are? The answer is among the neat twists of genetics: all those extra genes are just sitting around doing nothing, and that's just the way we want them. In fact, if they were all doing something, we'd be dead. Here is what I love about a female's X chromosomes: they are unpredictable. They do surprising things. They do not act like any of the other chromosomes in the body. As we shall see, to the extent that chromosomes can be said to have manners, the X chromosomes behave with great courtesy.
Esmeralda, Rosa, and Maria live in Zacadecas, Mexico, a village of 10,000 people that, though obscure to Americans north of the border, is big enough to be a center for the smaller and more obscure towns around it. Many people in Zacadecas earn their living picking chilis and packing them up for export. Esmeralda and Rosa are sisters, both in their teens, and Maria, two years old, is their niece.
*
They share an extremely rare condition, so rare that their extended family may be the only people in the world to carry it. Called generalized congenital hypertrichosis, the syndrome is an atavism, a throwback to our ancient mammalian state, when we were happily covered in homegrown fur and had no need of sweatshops and Calvin Klein's soft-core porn. The term
hypertrichosis
explains all,
trichosis
meaning hair growth, and
hyper
meaning exactly what it says.
Atavisms result when a normally dormant gene from our prehistoric roots is for some reason reactivated. Atavisms, remind us, in the most
*
The names are pseudonyms.

 

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palpable and surreal manner possible, of our bonds with other species. They tell us that evolution, like the pueblo builders of the Southwest, does not obliterate what came before but builds on top of and around it. Atavisms are not uncommon. Some people possess an extra nipple or two beyond the usual pair, a souvenir of the ridge of mammary tissue that extends from the top of the shoulder down to the hips and that in most mammals terminates in multiple teats. Babies on occasion are born with small tails or with webbing between their fingers, as though they are reluctant to leave the forest or the seas.
In the case of congenital hypertrichosis, a gene that fosters the generous growth of hair across the face and body has been rekindled. Nothing else happens out of the ordinary, no skeletal deformities or mental retardation or any of the other sorrows that often accompany a genetic change. The people with the condition, this large and locally renowned family living on the border of Zacadecas, simply grow a kind of pelt. They make you wonder why human beings ever shed their fur in the first place, a puzzle that evolutionary biologists have yet to crack. And despite your nobler sentiments, they also make you think of werewolves. In fact, historians of myth have suggested that conditions like hypertrichosis other types of excess hirsutism exist beyond this rare mutation gave rise to the legend of the werewolf.
Another element of the werewolf story resonates with the case of Esmeralda, Rosa, and Maria. As you may recall, the werewolf crosses over to his bristly alter ego on a night of a full moon only gradually. At ten P.M., the first anomalous whiskers begin clouding the sides of his face. At eleven, the hair has crept down his forehead and across his cheeks. By midnight, the coverage has become complete, and he is free to explore his nocturnal appetites. The girls of Zacadecas are like points on the werewolf's clock. Esmeralda, who at seventeen is the eldest, is barely ten o'clock. You can see patches of dark downy hair at the edges of her chin and cheeks and around the ear area, almost as though she were standing in the shadows beneath the brutal sun of summer. It's enough to mark her as a member of her rare tribe, but not enough to inhibit her verve or keep her from dating a handsome selection of boys.
Maria, the toddler, stands at the eleven o'clock mark. Her cheeks, her chin, and the top of her forehead are streaked with dark, fine, slightly wavy hair, which will darken and thicken with age. She looks as though

 

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she has bangs growing up from her eyebrows toward the scalp. Her eyes are dark and bright and full of joy. She has not yet learned to feel shame.
Rosa, fifteen years old, nearly qualifies as the werewolf at midnight. Much of her face the cheeks, chin, forehead, nose is covered by hair; there is far more hair than skin to be seen. She is in fact hairier than a chimpanzee or a gorilla, both of which lack hair around the cheeks, nose, and eyes. Luis Figuera, of the University of Guadalajara, who is studying hypertrichosis, told me that when he first met Rosa he was startled by her appearance, but that after talking with her for a while he stopped noticing it. Eventually, he felt confident enough to ask her if he could touch her face, and she agreed. "It was like stroking the head of a baby," he said. "It was like petting a cat." Rosa's facial hair is thicker than that of any other female in her family. It is almost as dense as that of some of her male relatives, in whom the congenital condition finds its fullest expression. Two of the men earn their living in circus sideshows, where they are displayed as "dog men" or ''people of the forest." Others shave their entire face, twice a day. Neither Rosa nor her older sister shaves; they are afraid that shaving will make the hair grow back coarser and darker. Instead, Rosa keeps herself largely hidden from the world. When she's not in school or at the marketplace, she stays indoors. She prefers to keep the shutters closed. She is gentle and shy and doesn't expect to have much of a social or love life.
People commonly dream about being caught naked in public, and they wake up embarrassed. I imagine Rosa dreaming of losing her hair, every last dark muffling lock on her body. In her dreams she is neither ashamed nor afraid, but instead feels free, able to float above the flesh of earth and fate, her upturned face as smooth as a stone.
The spectrum of hair growth seen on the girls of Zacadecas illustrates an outstanding feature of female heritage. My father thought the male had the edge in variation, the chromosomal complexity. To the contrary. It is the woman who is the greater mosaic, a patchwork of her past. Every person has two copies of each of the twenty-three chromosomes, one from mother, one from father. For twenty-two sets of those chromosomes, both versions operate. They make us who we are, an idiosyncratic porridge of our parents his Roman nose, her rotten teeth, the worst and best of their mediocrities and charms.
For us women, something different from the rest of our genetic

 

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legacy happens to our sex chromosomes. The two X chromosomes come together in the formation of the embryo, and as with all the chromosomes, copies of each are apportioned to each cell of the growing baby. But then, during our embryonic unfolding, each cell makes its own decision: do we want Mom, or do we prefer Father? Will we keep the maternal X chromosome active, or the paternal? Once the decision is made and usually it is made randomly the cell shuts down the other X, snaps it off chemically. It is a dramatic event, the shutting down of thousands and thousands of genes aligned along the entire length of a chromosome. It is like one of the great New York City blackouts, when thousands of brilliantly lit buildings suddenly blinked off. Click! cries a liver cell. There goes mother love! But then a brain cell makes up its mind, and the maternal chromosome is kept alive while the father X is nullified. Not every gene is shut off on the so-called inactivated X; a few stay lit, to match the handful of genes found on the male's dwarf of a Y chromosome. Nevertheless, thousands of genes are dispensed with in a given cell, and they are either thousands from the mother or thousands from the father.
So we can understand why the hirsute girls demonstrated such outstanding discrepancies in appearance. The gene behind congenital hypertrichosis, the atavism that once helped lend us a mammalian mantle, is located on the X chromosome. In most of us, the gene doesn't operate. The shaggy look does not suit human aesthetics, it doesn't do much to attract a mate, and so the gene has fallen fallow. But in the family with hypertrichosis, the gene has risen from its coma. It works. It makes a kind of fur. Each of the girls has inherited one copy of the fully awakened gene, Esmeralda and Rosa from their mother, niece Maria from her father. And each child is a mosaic of X chromosomes with the trait and X chromosomes without. Esmeralda's face is thus largely the face of her father, he of the unaffected X. Just by chance, the vast majority of the follicle cells on her cheeks, forehead, nose, and chin switched off the maternal X chromosome, allowing the unaffected paternal chromosome to dominate her appearance and thus keep the mark of the werewolf at bay. Her sister's face took nearly the opposite path, the cells switching off the paternal chromosome and putting the woolly maternal X to work. Maria ended up with six of one, half a dozen of the other. All was chance, all was a crapshoot. The switching

 

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pattern of the chromosomes could as easily have gone the other way for the sisters; and indeed, if they themselves have daughters, the child of the merry popular one could prove to have cheeks that feel to the touch like the face of a cat.
The world may not make it out so easily, but we are all of us gals strange little quilts, patches of father-tone in some of our tissues, shades of mother in the others. We are more motley by far than our brothers. A son, in fact, may rightfully be thought of as a mama's boy: he has her X chromosome alive in every cell of his body. He has no choice it's the only X he's got, and every cell needs it. Thus he has more of his mother's genes operating in his body than he does of his father's, thousands more. Yes, the Y chromosome is there, and that is solely a father-to-son transaction; but remember that the Y is genetically impoverished compared to the X. If you do the calculations, your brother works out to be about 6 percent more related to your mother than to your father, and he is 3 percent more related to your mother than you are, because half your cells, on average, have the mother chromosome turned off, while all of his remain turned on. These are not inconsequential figures. In a way, I'm sorry to mention them. They disrupt the image of the matriline, of our female connectedness to the ancestral parade of mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, the blessed founding matriarch. (On an interesting side note, male identical twins are more identical than female twins, again as a result of X inactivation. Male twins share the totality of their maternal X chromosomes, as well as having all the other chromosomes in common, but female twins have a diverging patchwork of maternal and paternal X chromosomes operating in different parts of their bodies.)
Men, perhaps, will be hardly more delighted at the thought of their maternal vinculum. Don't men want so badly to
individuate
, to pull away from the omnipotent female who dominated their world for the first fragile years of their lives? And then to find out that she is more a part of them than they thought! I know my father would not be pleased. He felt smothered by his mother, in all the classic ways. People would tell him, You should read D. H. Lawrence you'll identify with the story of him and his mother! And my father would say, Why should I read about it? I lived it, and that was bad enough.
In lieu of another link to the matriline I offer this enchanting

 

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