Mutants

by Armand Marie Leroi

  Female spotted hyenas have genitals like no other mammal. Their most prominent feature is a clitoris as large as a male’s penis, complete with a genitourinary tract, an orifice at its tip and the ability to jaunt erect during dominance displays. Beneath that, where the vagina should be, is a structure that looks remarkably like a scrotum but which contains a pad of fat rather than testicles. Lacking a vagina, the female spotted hyena copulates and gives birth through her clitoris.

  And a painful business it is. The first time spotted hyenas give birth their clitoral tracts are so narrow that labour takes hours, during which time more than 60 per cent of the cubs suffocate and about 9 per cent of the mothers die. Though Aristotle denied it, the idea that spotted hyenas are true hermaphrodites persisted until the nineteenth century. They are not, for internally female and male hyenas are quite distinct – one has ovaries, the other testes and that’s all. Since the females of the striped and brown hyenas (the spotted’s closest living relations) have typical mammalian genitalia, spotted hyenas are, in a real sense, female pseudohermaphrodites, albeit ones in which the pathological has become normal.

  The placentas of spotted hyenas have been examined; they too produce large amounts of testosterone and have – one might have guessed it – a natural deficiency of aromatase. The hyena aromatase gene has not yet been cloned, so we do not know quite how it differs from those of the brown and striped hyenas. But it is likely that the spotted hyena acquired, somewhere in its history, an aromatase gene with a mutation rather like that which our Japanese girl had. This need not be the case – it could be that the mutation occurred in another gene which regulates aromatase – but whatever the truth may be, aromatase levels almost certainly explain, at least in part, why female spotted hyena cubs are born with masculinised genitalia. What effect this testosterone has on expectant hyena mothers is difficult to say; they are hairy at the best of times.

  THE OBJECT OF DESIRE

  In The symposium, Plato gives Aristophanes a speech to account for the origin of sexual desire. There once were, Aristophanes says – he is speaking of some mythical past epoch – three human genders: male, female and hermaphrodite. These humans were not as humans are now, but rather fused together in pairs: male to male, female to female and, the hemaphrodite majority, male to female. His description suggests that these Ür-humans looked something like cephalothoracoileopagus conjoined twins. Able to cartwheel on their eight limbs, they were troublesome, vigorous and proud, and Zeus was puzzled what to do about them. His solution was to cut them in half. Since then, every human has sought to be reunited with his or her other half. This explains why some of us are drawn to our own sex, but most of us are drawn to the other.

  The causes of our various sexual orientations are so obscure that Aristophanes’ explanation is about as good as many others current today. Perhaps this is why many people resist the search for a biological explanation of sexual orientation. But unless we are Cartesian dualists (and no biologist is), the distinction between body and mind is merely a matter of the degree of our ignorance – bodies being things we understand, minds being all that we do not. And there is no doubt that the complex chain of molecular events that controls the devices of desire, our genitals, also influences its object – whom we choose when we give away our hearts.

  What makes the case of Alexina/Abel so fascinating is that, raised as a girl, she fell in love with girls – that is, her loves were those appropriate to her sex, but her true, hidden, sex rather than her apparent one. This may seem reasonable enough, but many physicians and anthropologists think otherwise. For them, sexual orientation is made by social influences, by how a child is raised, especially early in life. In their view, Alexina/Abel having been raised as a girl among girls should have grown up to love men. Physicians take this idea from 1950s sexology; anthropologists from the writings of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. Whatever the source, such social constructivist notions of gender are swiftly losing ground to the molecular genetic study of sexual behaviour.

  Even in 1979, a study of the sexuality of the Dominican Republic guevedoche made a convincing case that hormones must count for something. Like Alexina/Abel, the guevedoche have traditionally been raised as girls and yet, almost invariably, take on a male identity as adults. They may not have had enough DHT to make good male genitals, but it seems that they received enough testosterone, either in the womb or at puberty, to make them feel like men and to make them desire and marry women. Yet they do not have it easy. As youths, they are often diffident lovers, fearing that women will ridicule them for the shape of their genitals. The label ‘guevedoche‘ is, for the villagers of Salinas, a term used in unkindness rather than anything else.

  The kwolu-aatmwol of Papua New Guinea have it no easier. There, only a minority of male pseudohermaphrodites are mistaken for girls; the rest are seen as boys, albeit somehow incomplete. To become men, Sambian boys must pass through an elaborate and secret set of initiation ceremonies, six in all. As in so many New Guinea cultures, these ceremonies are overtly homoerotic: young initiates must fellate older ones so that they may acquire, as the Sambia believe, a source of future semen. To the Western mind, the Sambia seem to heap cultural sexual confusion upon biological, but the boys who go through these homoerotic ceremonies mostly end up as heterosexual married men. Not the kwolu-aatmwol, however. They, it seems, are admitted to the lowest rungs of this ladder of initiation but not the higher ones; they may fellate, but not be fellated – indeed, their genitals would hardly permit it. And so though they may mature in body and mind, they come to be socially stranded in late adolescence, a twilight world in which they can be neither boys nor men.

  VIII

  A FRAGILE BUBBLE

  [ON SKIN]

  OUR SPECIES HAS, SINCE 1758, borne the flattering, if not always accurate, name Homo sapiens – thinking Man. At least that is what the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus called us in the tenth edition of his Systema naturae, the work which tax-onomists even now accept as the first authoritative source of the names which they have given the world’s creatures. It was nearly otherwise. In Linnaeus’ text, directly adjacent to the word ‘sapiens‘ is another designation, an apparent synonym for ourselves, yet one that is somehow never explained: ‘H. diurnus’ – Man of the day. It is a name that seems to have had particular resonance for Linnaeus. His notebooks show that he toyed with sapiens vs. diurnus for much of his life, and it is only in the tenth edition that the latter is firmly relegated to second place. On the face of it, Linnaeus’ belief that diurnality captured something special about our species is puzzling. Although we are undoubtedly daylight-loving creatures, so too are many others. It is only when one pages through the staggered typography and compressed Latin of Linnaeus’ text that one finds the explanation for his diurnal dreams. Linnaeus, godfather to humanity, believed that we were not alone.

  OCULOCUTANEOUS ALBINISM TYPE II. ZULU MAN, NATAL. FROM KARL PEARSON ET AL. 1913 A monograph on albinism in man.

  Long before palaeontologists unearthed from Serengeti dongas the bones of our extinct Hominid cousins, Linnaeus believed that the remoter parts of the world were peopled by other species of humans. He was not thinking about the humans who lived in Asia, Africa or the New World; they clearly belonged to the same species as himself. He was thinking of something altogether more exotic: a species of human that was bowed and shrunken in form, that had short curly hair rather like an African’s, only fair, that had skin as white as chalk and slanted golden eyes. With eyesight as poor by day as it was acute by night, they were crepuscular, cavern-dwelling creatures who emerged at dusk to raid the farms of their more intelligent cousins. They were ancient; perhaps they had even ruled the earth before Man, but now they were on the retreat. This species, Linnaeus said, was ‘a child of darkness which turns day into night and night into day and appears to be our closest relative’. True, he had never seen one, but had not Pliny and Ptolemy written of the Leucaethopes? And had they not been seen more recently, not least by his o
wn students, in Ethiopia, Java, the Ternate Islands and Mount Ophir of Malacca? The reports seemed vivid and precise: in Ceylon they were called Chacrelats; in Amboina, Kakurlakos – from the Dutch for ‘cockroach’; and everywhere they were despised. This was enough for Linnaeus, and true to his classifier’s instinct, he gave them a name: Homo troglodytes – cave-dwelling Man. And next to that he wrote ‘H. nocturnus’ – Man of the night.

  What was Linnaeus thinking of? As the founder of modern biological classification, his name is second only to that of Darwin in the naturalist’s pantheon. But no one reads Systema naturae any more, much less his many other works, and we forget that his mind was as much the mind of a medieval mystic as of an Enlightenment savant. Linnaeus was frankly credulous. He believed that swallows hibernate at the bottom of lakes; that if the back of a puppy were rubbed with acquavit it would grow up dwarfed; and that Lapland was the home of a creature called the Furia infernalis, the Fury of Hell, that flew through the air without the aid of wings and fell upon men and cattle, fatally running them through.

  LINNAEUS‘ HOMO TROGYLODYTES OR BONTIUS’S ORANG. FROM KARL PEARSON ET AL. 1913 A monograph on albinism in man.

  This last was clearly fantastic even to Linnaeus’ contemporaries. Not so Homo troglodytes. By the 1750s it was well known that Africa at least contained creatures similar to man; Edward Tyson, after all, had dissected his ‘pygmy’ or chimpanzee more than fifty years previously. Another such creature, half man-half ape – the matter was all very obscure – was thought to live in the Malay Archipelago. The Dutch naturalist Jacob Bontius had illustrated just such an ‘ourang-outang’ in his Historia naturalis indiae orientalis (1658). Bontius’s ourang is a fairly human, if hairy, female wearing nothing but an alluring expression; a century later Linnaeus borrowed this woodcut and relabelled it Homo troglodytes. Bontius himself had little to say about his ourang (though he rightly questioned the Malay belief that it was the progeny of Javanese women and the local apes), so Linnaeus grafted onto its image the ancient tradition that spoke of a remote and secretive race of unnaturally white, golden-eyed and profoundly photophobic people. It is these characteristics that yield the identity of the remainder of the melange that is Homo troglodytes. Shorn of its body hair and cavernicolous habitat, it is clear that Linnaeus’ Man of the night is just an ordinary human albino.

  GENEVIÈVE

  Linnaeus was not the only eighteenth-century naturalist with an interest in albinos. His French rival Buffon was another, but unlike Linnaeus, Buffon actually met one. In his Histoire naturelle, he writes of an encounter with a girl named Geneviève. She was eighteen years old, a native of Dominica, the daughter of slaves transported there from the Gold Coast, and now the servant of a wealthy Parisienne. Buffon examined her minutely. She was 151 centimetres (four feet eleven inches) tall, with slanted grey eyes slightly tinted orange towards the lens, and skin the colour of chalk. Yet her facial features, he said, were absolutely those of a négresse noire, a black African woman. True, her ears were stuck unusually high on her head, yet even so they were quite different from those of the Blafards, the albinos of the Darien Peninsula, whose ears were said to be both small and translucent. Buffon measured her limbs, her head, her feet, her hair; he devotes a paragraph to her breasts, notes that she was a virgin, and then, with interest, that she could blush.

  What made Geneviève white? Buffon was certain that Linnaeus’ Homo troglodytes was just an ape. As for the Blafards, Kakurlakos and Chacrelats, these were merely descriptions of anomalously depigmented people living amid an otherwise dark-skinned population. One in ten children born in the Caribbean islands, he was told, was an albino. Geneviève’s parents were black, as were her siblings; whatever the cause of her whiteness it could not be contagious or even racial. Though he failed to solve the problem of albinism, when compared to the fantasies of Linnaeus, Buffon left it immeasurably clearer. He also commissioned a lithograph of Geneviève, which shows her standing amid tropical fruit, quite naked and snow-white, as if in a photographic negative, smiling gently, perhaps at the absurdity of scientists.

  OCULOCUTANEOUS ALBINISM TYPE II. GENEVIèVE. FROM GEORGE LECLERC BUFFON 1777 Histoire naturelle générale et particulière.

  THE PALETTE

  We are a polychrome species. Yet the palette of human colour has only two pigments on it. One, eumelanin, is responsible for the darker shades in our skin, hair and eyes, the browns and the blacks; the other, phaeomelanin, for the fairer shades, the blonds and reds. As a painter mixes three primary colours to get all others, so too the various shades of our skins are given by the mix of these pigments.

  Blacks have lots of eumelanin; redheads have lots of phaeomelanin; blonds have little of either. Albinos have no skin pigments at all. The pigments themselves are made in cells called melanocytes that are found within the top layers of the skin, the epidermis. These melanocytes package pigments into sub-cellular structures called melanosomes which they then transfer to the skin cells immediately above them, giving them colour. Mutations in several genes cause albinism. The most common disables one of the enzymes that melanocytes use to make pigment. In such cases even the eyes are devoid of pigment, and their redness comes from the retina’s blood vessels. The absence of pigment makes albinos sensitive to light and they often squint – hence the photophobia and slanted eyes of the Kakurlakos and Blafards. But some albinos have at least some pigment in their eyes, and in these cases the defect lies in a protein that is called, somewhat enigmatically, ‘P’, used in the packaging and transport of melanosomes. Geneviève’s eyes were grey, not red, and it is almost certain that both copies of her P gene were defective. We can even guess what the mutation was. The most common cause of albinism in Africa is homozygosity for a 2.7 kilobase-pair deletion in the P gene. The same mutation is found in the Caribbean and among blacks in the United States as well, carried there by the slave trade.

  There are no tribes, races or nations of albinos anywhere in the world; however, Pliny’s Leucaethopes are not entirely without foundation. About 1 in 36,000 Europeans is born albino, and 1 in 10,000 Africans. But the number jumps to 1 in 4500 among the Zulu and 1 in 1100 among the Ibo of Nigeria, and in very local populations the frequency can become even higher. In 1871, en route to his encounter with the Aka pygmies, George Schweinfurth came across some.

  There is one special characteristic that is quite peculiar to the Monbuttos. To judge from the hundreds who paid visits of curiosity to my tent, and from the thousands whom I saw during my three weeks sojourn with Munza, I should say that at least 5 per cent of the population have light hair. This was always of the closely-frizzled negro type, and was always associated with the lightest skin that I had seen since leaving lower Egypt…All the individuals who had this light hair and complexion had a sickly expression about the eyes and presented many signs of pronounced albinism.

  That albinism can be so common is a bit surprising. African albinos have, by any account, a hard time of it. Not only do they often suffer social discrimination and have difficulty finding marriage partners, but for want of pigment they cannot work for any length of time outdoors, and they are also prone to melanomas, a particularly destructive variety of skin cancer. These selective disadvantages should act to keep albino genes, and hence albinos, rare. Some geneticists have suggested that one reason for the high frequency (1 in 200) of albinism among the Hopi Indians of Arizona is that albino men, excused from working in the fields, stay at home and therefore dally among the women. But the evidence for this seems to rest on the charms of one old Hopi gentleman who was reputed to have fathered more than a dozen illicit children.

  PIEBALDS

  Those children would have fascinated Buffon. In his search for an explanation for albinism, grasping at a theory of inheritance that did not yet exist, he was keen to know what the offspring of a union between an albino and someone with normal pigmentation would be. He thought they might be piebald. In the Histoire naturelle he gives another lithograph. This one is of a girl, pe
rhaps four years of age, standing amid a clutter of exotic artefacts: a parasol, axes, a blanket and a feathered headdress. A small parrot, a household pet, perches upon her hand suspended in mid-air. The girl has a two-tone body: a mosaic of black and white.

  PIEBALDING. MARIE SABINA, COLUMBIA 1749. FROM GEORGE LECLERC BUFFON 1777 Histoire naturelle générale et particulière.

  Buffon never met the child, knew little about her origins, and described her entirely from a picture. Painted in Columbia by an unknown artist around 1740, the portrait was dispatched to Europe on a Spanish vessel which was promptly seized by the West Indies squadron of the Royal Navy. Now a trophy of war, the picture was taken to Carolina where it was copied at least twice. One of these copies, or perhaps the original, was sent to London, but this ship was plundered as well – it was the French navy’s turn – and the painting was placed in the hands of the Burgomaster of Dunkirk, a M. Taverne, who sent it to Buffon. And so the War of the Spanish Succession brought Marie Sabina, the piebald child, to the eyes of Europe’s greatest naturalist.

  Buffon was enchanted. His copy of the portrait, which is now lost, bore the following inscription:

  The True

  Picture of Marie-

  Sabina who was born