Woman, an Intimate Geography, by Natalie Angier, A Puke (TM) Audiobook

INTRODUCTION.
INTO THE LIGHT.
THIS BOOK is a celebration of the female body, its anatomy, its chemistry, its evolution, and its laughter. It is a personal book, my attempt to find a way to think about the biology of being female without falling into the sludge of biological determinism. It is a book about things that we traditionally associate with the image of woman, the womb, the egg, the breast, the blood, the almighty clitoris, and things that we don't, movement, strength, aggression, and fury.
It is a book about rapture, a rapture grounded firmly in the flesh, the beauties of the body. The female body deserves Dionysian respect, and to make my case I summon the spirits and cranks that I know and love best. I call on science and medicine, to sketch a working map of the parts that we call female and to describe their underlying dynamism. I turn to Darwin and evolutionary theory, to thrash out the origins of our intimate geography, why our bodies look and behave as they do, why they look rounded and smooth, but act ragged and rough. I cull from history, art, and literature, seeking insight into how a particular body part or body whim has been phrased over time. I pick and choose, discriminately and impulsively, from the spectacular advances in our understanding of genetics, the brain, hormones, and development, to offer possible scripts for our urges and actions. I toss out ideas and theories, about the origins of the breast, the purpose of orgasm, the blistering love that we have for our mothers, the reason that women need and spurn each other with almost equal zeal. Some of the theories are woolier than others. Some theories I offer up because I stumbled on them in the course of research and found them fascinating, dazzling, like Kusten Hawkes's proposal that grandmothers gave birth to the human race simply by refusing to die when their ovaries did. Other theories I pitch for their contrariety, their power to buck the party line of woman's "nature," while still others I throw out like rice at a bride, for luck, cheer, hope, and anarchy.
Admittedly, a Dionysian state of body is not easily won, for the female body has been abominably regarded over the centuries. It has been made too much of or utterly ignored. It has been conceived of as the second sex, the first draft, the faulty sex, the default sex, the consolation prize, the succubus, the male interruptus. We are lewd, prim, bestial, ethereal. We have borne more illegitimate metaphors than we have unwanted embryos.
But, women, we know how much of this is trash: very pretty, very elaborate, almost flattering in its ferocity, but still, in the end, trash. We may love men and we may live with men, but some of them have said stupendously inaccurate things about us, our bodies, and our psyches. Take the example of the myth of the inner sanctum. Men look at our bodies and they can't readily see our external genitals; our handy chamois triangle, that natural leaf of pubis ficus, obscures the contours of the vulva. At the same time men hunger to breach the portal of fur and the outer pleats, to reach the even more concealed internal genitalia, the sacred nave of the vagina. No wonder, then, that woman becomes conflated with interiority. Men want what they cannot see, and so they assume we relish, perhaps smugly, the moatness of ourselves. Woman the bowl, the urn, the cave, the musky jungle. We are the dark mysterium! We are hidden folds and primal wisdom and always, always the womb, bearing life, releasing life, and then sucking it back in again, into those moist, chthonic plaits. "Male sexuality, then, returning to this primal source, drinks at the spring of being and enters the murky region, where up is down and death is life, of mythology," John Updike has written.
But, sisters, are we cups and bottles, vessels and boxes? Are we orb-weaving spiders crouched in the web of our wombs, or blind spiders living in the underground of our furtivity? Are we so interior and occult? Hecate, no! No more or less than men. True, men have penises that appear to externalize them, to give them thrust and parry in the world beyond their bodies, but the sensations their penises bring them, like those the clitoris brings us, are splendidly, internally, globally felt; do not even the toes feel orgasm, whatever the sex of the toes' owner may be? Men have external testes, while women's ovaries are tucked inside, not far below the line of the hipbones. But both organs release their products and exert their endocrinological and reproductive effects internally. Men live in their heads, as we do, trapped in the fable of the universal mind.
At the same time, neither we nor men have a good sense of what our interior bodies are doing from one moment to the next, of the work performed by liver, heart, hormones, neurons. Yet the possession of all this powerful, covert organic activity in no way imposes on any of us, male or female, an aura of mystique. I have pancreas: I am Enigma.
Even during pregnancy, the event that perhaps epitomizes the notion of woman as a subterranean sorceress, the mother is often not in tune with her great endarkened magic. I recall sitting in the thickness of my third trimester and feeling my baby fidget within me practically nonstop. But I had no idea whether she was kicking with her foot, jabbing with her elbow, or butting her head against the amniotic trampoline, let alone whether she was blissful, anxious, or bored. Before undergoing amniocentesis, I was convinced that my intuition, feminine? maternal? reptilian?, had figured out the fetus's sex. It was the ultimate gut feeling, and it growled like a boy. I dreamed about an egg colored a bright royal blue, and I woke up embarrassed at the crude exhibitionism of the symbol. At least that clinches it, I thought; Mama is about to hatch a son. Well, the amniocentesis spoke otherwise: he was a she.
The equation of the female body with mystery and sanctum sanctorum extends its foolish villi in all directions. We become associated with the night, the earth, and of course the moon, which like the bouncing ball of old Hollywood musicals so deftly follows our "inescapable" cyclicity. We wax toward ovulation, we wane with blood. The moon pulls us, it tugs at our wombs, even gives us our menstrual cramps. My dearest damas, do you ever feel like creeping out at night to howl at the full moon? Maybe so; the full moon is so beautiful, after all, particularly when it's near the horizon and smeared slightly into buttery breastiness. Yet this desire to howl with joy has little to do with our likelihood of buying tampons; in fact, I'd guess that most of us, those of us who menstruate, haven't a clue where in the lunar cycle our period falls. Nevertheless, flatulisms die hard, and so we continue to encounter slickly tired descriptions of woman as an ingredient on an organic food label, like the following from Camille Paglias Sexual Personae:
Nature's cycles are woman's cycles. Biologic femaleness is a sequence of circular returns, beginning and ending at the same point. Woman does not dream of transcendental or historical escape from the natural cycle, since she is that cycle. Her sexual maturity means marriage to the moon, waxing and waning in lunar phases. The ancients knew that woman is bound to nature's calendar, an appointment she cannot refuse. She knows there is no free will, since she is not free. She has no choice but acceptance. Whether she desires motherhood or not, nature yokes her into the brute inflexible rhythm of procreative law. Menstrual cycle is an alarming clock that cannot be stopped until nature wills it. Moon, month, menses: same word, same world.
Ah, yes. Etymology is ever the arbiter of truth.
It makes a gal so alarmed, so lunatic really, to witness the resuscitation in recent times of all the fetid cliches that I, and probably you, my sisters, thought had been drawn, quartered, and cremated long ago. I have been writing and reading about biology and evolution for years now, and I am frankly getting sick of how "science" is pinned to our she-butts like donkey tails and then glued in place with talk of hardheaded realism. I am tired of reading in books on evolutionary psychology or neo-Darwinism or gender biology about how women are really like all the old canards: that we have a lackadaisical sex drive compared to men and a relatively greater thirst for monogamy, and, outside the strictly sexual arena, a comparative lack of interest in achievement and renown, a preference for being rather than doing, a quiet, self-contained nature, a greater degree of "friendliness," a deficient mathematical ability, and so on et cetera back to the bleary Cro-Magnon beginnings. I'm tired of hearing about how there are sound evolutionary explanations for such ascriptions of woman's nature and how we must face them full square, chin up and smiling.
I'm tired as well of being told I mustn't let my feminist, pro-woman beliefs get in the way of seeing "reality" and acknowledging "the facts." I am tired of all this because I love animalism, and I love biology, and I love the body, particularly the female body. I love what the body brings to the brain when the brain gets depressed and uppity. But many of the current stories of the innate feminine are so impoverished, incomplete, and inaccurate, so remarkably free of real proof, that they simply do not ring true, not for me and not, I suspect, for many other women, who mostly ignore what science has to say to them and about them anyway.
At the same time, the standard arguments against Darwinism and the biological view of womanhood don't always succeed either, predicated as they often are on a rejection of the body, or at least of the impact that the body has on behavior. It is as though we were pure mind, and pure will, capable of psychospiritual rebirth throughout our lives, in no way beholden to the body or even encouraged to take a few tips from it now and again. Many of those who have criticized Darwinism and biologism are, alas, feminists and progressives, noble, necessary citizens, among whom I normally strive to count myself. Admittedly, the critics are often justified in their animadversion, whether they're attacking the myth of the passive female or the studies that purport to show immutable differences between male and female math skills. Nevertheless, they disappoint when all they can do is say nay. They pick out flaws, they grumble, they reject. Hormones don't count, appetites don't count, odors, sensations, and genitals don't count. The body is strictly vehicle, never driver. All is learned, all is social construct, all is the sequela of cultural conditioning. Critics also work from a premise, often unspoken, that human beings are special, maybe better, maybe worse, but ultimately different from the rest of evolution's handicraft. As such, they imply, we have little to learn about ourselves by studying other species, and we gals especially have a lot to lose. When, after all, have we ever benefited from being compared to a female lab rat?
In fact, we have a great deal to learn about ourselves by studying other species. Of course we do. If you watch other animals and don't see pieces of yourself in their behaviors, then you're not quite human, are you? I, for one, want to learn from other animals. I want to learn from a prairie vole about the unassailable logic of spending as much time as possible cuddled up with friends and loved ones. I want to learn from my cats, professional recreationists that they are, how to get a good night's sleep. I want to learn from pygmy chimpanzees, our bonobo sisters, how to settle arguments peacefully and pleasantly, with a bit of genito-genital rubbing; and I want to discover anew the value of sisterhood, of females sticking up for each other, which the bonobos do to such a degree that they are rarely violated or even pestered by males, despite the males' being larger and stronger. If women have managed to push the issues of sexual harassment, wife abuse, and rape into the public eye and onto legislative platters, they have succeeded only through persistent, organized, and sororal activity, all of which female bonobos perfected in their own protocognitive style long ago.
I believe that we can learn from other species, and from our pasts, and from our parts, which is why I wrote this book as a kind of scientific fantasia of womanhood. As easily as we can be abused by science, we can use it to our own ends. We can use it to exalt ourselves or amuse ourselves. Phylogeny, ontogeny, genetics, endocrinology: all are there to be sampled, and I am a shameless carpetbagger. I rifle through the female chromosome, the giant one called X, and ask why it is so big and whether it has any outstanding features (it does). I ask why women's genitals smell the way they do. I explore the chemical shifts that occur in a woman's life, during breastfeeding, menstruation, the onset of puberty, and menopause, among others, and consider how each breaks the monotony of physical homeostasis to bring the potential for clarity, a sharpening of the senses. And because we are none of us a closed system but, rather, suspended in the solution of our local universe, I ask how the body breathes in chemical signals from the outside and how that act of imbibing the world sways our behavior, how inspiration becomes revelation. The book is organized roughly from the small to the large, from the compactness and tangibility of the egg to the great sweet swamp of the sensation we call love. It divides into two overall sections, the first focused on body structures, the art objects of our anatomy, and the second on body systems, the hormonal and neural underpinnings of our actions and longings.
I want to say a few words about what this book is not. It is not about the biology of gender differences and how similar or dissimilar men and women may be. Of necessity, the book contains many references to men and male biology. We define ourselves in part by how we compare to the other, and the nearest other at hand is, as it happens, man. Nevertheless, I don't delve into the research on the way that different regions of the brain light up in men and women while they're remembering happy events or shopping lists, or what those differences might mean about why you want to talk about the relationship while he wants to watch hockey. I don't compare male and female scholastic aptitude scores. I don't ask which sex has a better sense of smell or sense of direction or innate inability to ask for directions. Even in Chapter 18, when I dissect some of the arguments put forth by evolutionary psychologists to explain the supposed discrepancies in male and female reproductive strategies, I'm interested less in the debate over gender differences than in challenging evolutionary psychology's anemic view of female nature. In sum, this book is not a dispatch from the front lines of the war between the sexes; it is a book about women. And though I hope my audience will include men as well as women, I write with the assumption that my average reader is a gal, a word, by the way, that I use liberally throughout the book, because I like it and because I keep thinking, against all evidence, that it is on the verge of coming back into style.
Another thing the book is not is practical. It is not a guide to women's health. I am scientifically and medically accurate where I can be, opinionated where there is room for argument. For example, on the subject of estrogen. This hormone is one of my favorites; it is a structural tone poem, as I try to convey in the chapter that honors it. But estrogen can be a Janus-faced hormone, bringing life and brain function on the one hand, death on the other; whatever the roots of breast cancer, the disease is often negotiated through estrogen. So while I'm glad to have been born with my female quotient of it, I have never sought it in supplement form. I have never taken birth control pills, and I have reservations about estrogen replacement therapy, an issue I discuss where appropriate but with absolutely no attempt at proselytizing. My book is not a spinoff of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which is a wonderful, ovarial work from which all we womanists hatched and needs no tepid imitations.
My book sets out to tackle the question "What makes a woman?" But I can only sidle up to the subject of femaleness clumsily, idiosyncratically, with my biases, impressions, and desires flapping out like the tongue of an untucked blouse. Ultimately, of course, every woman must decide for herself, from her clay of givens and takings, what has made her a woman. I hope simply to show how the body is part of the answer, is a map to meaning and freedom. Mary Carlson, of Harvard Medical School, has coined the term "liberation biology" to describe the use of biological insights to heal our psychic wounds, understand our fears, and make the most of what we have and of those who will have us and love us. It's a superb phrase. We need liberation, perpetual revolution. What better place to begin the insurrection than at the doors to the palace we've lived in all these years?

One. UNSCRAMBLING THE EGG.
IT BEGINS WITH ONE PERFECT SOLAR CELL.
PUT A FEW ADULTS in a room with a sweet-tempered infant, and you may as well leave a tub of butter sitting out in the midday sun. Within moments of crowding around the crib, their grown-up bones begin to soften and their spines to bend. Their eyes mist over with cataracts of pleasure. They misplace intellect and discover new vocal ranges, countertenor, soprano, piglet. And when they happen on the baby's hands, prepare for a variant on the ancient Ode to the Fingernail. Nothing so focuses adult adoration as a newborn's fingernail, its lovely condensed precocity. See the tiny cuticle below, the white eyebrow of keratin on top, the curved buff of the nail body, the irresistible businesslike quality of the whole: it looks like it really works! We love the infant fingernail for its capacity to flatter, its miniature yet faithful recreation of our own form. More than in the thigh or the eye or even the springy nautilus shell of the ear, in the baby's nail sits the homunculus, the adult in preview. And so, we are reminded, the future is assured.
Myself, I prefer eggs.
At some point midway through my pregnancy, when I knew I was carrying a daughter, I began to think of myself as standing in a room with two facing mirrors, so that looking into one mirror you see the other mirror reflecting it, and you, off into something approaching an infinity of images. At twenty weeks' gestation, my girl held within her nine-ounce, banana-sized body, in a position spatially equivalent to where she floated in me, the tangled grapevines of my genomic future. Halfway through her fetal tenure, she already had all the eggs she would ever have, packed into ovaries no bigger than the letters ova you just passed. My daughter's eggs are silver points of potential energy, the light at the beginning of the tunnel, a near-life experience. Boys don't make sperm, their proud "seed", until they reach puberty. But my daughter's sex cells, our seed, are already settled upon prenatally, the chromosomes sorted, the potsherds of her parents' histories packed into their little phospholipid baggies.
The image of the nested Russian dolls is used too often. I see it everywhere, particularly in descriptions of scientific mysteries (you open one mystery, you encounter another). But if there were ever an appropriate time to dust off the simile, it's here, to describe the nested nature of the matriline. Consider, if you will, the ovoid shape of the doll and the compelling unpredictability and fluidity of dynasty. Open the ovoid mother and find the ovoid girl; open the child and the next egg grins up its invitation to crack it. You can never tell a priori how many iterations await you; you hope they continue forever. My daughter, my matryoshka.
I said a moment ago that my daughter had all her eggs in mid-fetushood. In fact she was goosed up way beyond capacity, a fatly subsidized poultry farm. She had all her eggs and many more, and she will lose the great majority of those glittering germ cells before she begins to menstruate. At twenty weeks' gestation, the peak of a female's oogonial load, the fetus holds 6 to 7 million eggs. In the next twenty weeks of wombing, 4 million of those eggs will die, and by puberty all but 400,000 will have taken to the wing, without a squabble, without a peep.
The attrition continues, though at a more sedate pace, throughout a woman's youth and early middle age. At most, 450 of her eggs will be solicited for ovulation, and far fewer than that if she spends a lot of time being pregnant and thus not ovulating. Yet by menopause, few if any eggs remain in the ovaries. The rest have vanished. The body has reclaimed them.
This is a basic principle of living organisms. Life is profligate; life is a spendthrift; life can persist only by living beyond its means. You make things in extravagant abundance, and then you shave back, throw away, kill off the excess. Through extensive cell death the brain is molded, transformed from a teeming pudding of primitive, overpopulous neurons into an organized structure of convolutions and connections, recognizable lobes and nuclei; by the time the human brain has finished developing, in infancy, 90 percent of its original cell number has died, leaving the privileged few to sustain the hard work of dwelling on mortality. This is also how limbs are built. At some point in embryo-genesis, the fingers and toes must be relieved of their interdigital webbing, or we would emerge from our amniotic aquarium with flippers and fins. And this too is how the future is laid down.
The millions of eggs that we women begin with are cleanly destroyed through an innate cell program called apoptosis. The eggs do not simply die, they commit suicide. Their membranes ruffle up like petticoats whipped by the wind and they break into pieces, thence to be absorbed bit by bit into the hearts of neighboring cells. By graciously if melodramatically getting out of the way, the sacrificial eggs leave their sisters plenty of hatching room. I love the word apoptosis, the onomatopoeia of it: a-POP-tosis. The eggs pop apart like poked soap bubbles, a brief flash of taut, refracted light and then, ka-ping! And while my girl grew toward completion inside me, her fresh little eggs popped by the tens of thousands each day. By the time she is born, I thought, her eggs will be the rarest cells in her body.
Scientists have made much of apoptosis in the past few years. They have sought to link every disease known to granting agencies, whether cancer, Alzheimer's, or AIDS, to a breakdown in the body's ability to control when pieces of itself must die. Just as a pregnant woman sees nothing but a sea of swollen bellies all around her, so scientists see apoptosis gone awry in every ill person or sickly white mouse they examine, and they promise grand paybacks in cures and amelioratives if they ever master apoptosis. For our purposes, let us think not of disease or dysfunction; let us instead praise the dying hordes, and lubricate their departure with tears of gratitude. Yes, it's wasteful, yes, it seems stupid to make so much and then immediately destroy nearly all of it, but would nature get anywhere if she were stingy? Would we expect to see her flagrant diversity, her blowsy sequins and feather boas, if she weren't simply and reliably too much? Think of it this way: without the unchosen, there can be no choosing. Unless we break eggs, there can be no souffle. The eggs that survive the streamlining process could well be the tastiest ones in the nest.
And so, from an eggy perspective, we may not be such random, sorry creatures after all, such products of contingency or freak odds as many of us glumly decided during our days of adolescent sky-punching (Why me, oh Lord? How did that outrageous accident happen?). The chances of any of us being, rather than not being, may not be so outrageous, considering how much was winnowed out before we ever arrived at the possibility of being. I used to wonder why life works as well as it does, why humans and other animals generally emerge from incubation in such beautiful condition, why there aren't more developmental horrors. We all know about the high rate of spontaneous miscarriages during the first trimester of pregnancy, and we have all heard that the majority of those miscarriages are blessed expulsions, eliminating embryos with chromosomes too distorted for being. Yet long before that point, when imperfect egg has met bad sperm, came the vast sweeps of the apoptotic broom, the vigorous judgment of no, no, no. Not you, not you, and most definitely not you. Through cell suicide, we at last get to yes, a rare word, but beautiful in its rarity.
We are all yeses. We are worthy enough, we passed inspection, we survived the great fetal oocyte extinctions. In that sense, at least, call it a mechanospiritual sense, we are meant to be. We are good eggs, every one of us.
If you have never had trouble with your eggs, if you have never had to worry about your fecundity, you probably haven't given your eggs much thought, or dwelled on their dimensions, the particular power that egg cells enclose. You think of eggs, you think food: poached, scrambled, or forbidden. Or maybe you were lucky enough as a child to find in your back yard a nest with two or three robin's eggs inside, each looking so tender and pale that you held your breath before venturing to touch one. I was unhappily familiar in my girlhood with another sort of animal egg, that of a cockroach; usually I found the empty egg case after its cargo had safely departed, a sight as disturbing as that of a spent shotgun shell and more evidence of the insect's supremacy.
The symbolic impact of the egg in many cultures is as an oval. The egg of the world, thick toward the bottom to ground us, thinner at the apex as though pointing toward the heavens. In medieval paintings and cathedral tympana, Christus Regnans sits in a heavenly ovoid: he who gave birth to the world was born unto the world to secure it from death. At Easter we paint eggs to celebrate rebirth, resurrection; in the egg is life, as life is cradled in the cupped, ovoid palms of the hands. The Hindu gods Ganesha and Shiva Nataraja sit or dance in egg-shaped, flame-tipped backdrops. In painting her vulval flowers, the petals opening onto other petals like abstract pastel matryoshkas, Georgia O'Keeffe evoked as well the image of the egg, as though female genitalia recapitulate female procreative powers.
The egg of a chicken or other bird is a triumph in packaging. A female bird makes the bulk of the egg inside her reproductive tract long before mating with a male. She supplies the egg with all the nutrients the chick embryo will require to reach pecking independence. The reason that an egg yolk is so rich in cholesterol, and thus that people see it as gastronomically risque, is that a growing fetus needs ample cholesterol to build the membranes of the cells of which the body, any body, is constructed. The bird gives the egg protein, sugars, hormones, growth factors. Only after the cupboards are fully stocked will the egg be fertilized by sperm, sealed with a few calciferous layers of eggshell, and finally laid. Bird eggs are usually oval, in part for aerodynamic reasons: the shape makes their odyssey down the cloaca, the bird's equivalent of a birth canal, that much smoother.
We gals have been called chicks, and in Britain we've been birds, but if our eggs are any indication, the comparison is daft. A woman's egg, like that of any other mammal, has nothing avian about it. There is no shell, of course, and there really is no yolk, although the aqueous body of the egg, the cytoplasm, would feel a bit yolky to the touch if it were big enough to stick your finger in. But a human egg has no food with which to feed an embryo. And though one springs to fullness upon ovulation each month, it most certainly is not the pit-faced, frigid moon.
I have another suggestion. Let's reject the notion that men have exclusive rights to the sun. Must Helios, Apollo, Ra, Mithras, and the other golden boys take up every seat in the solar chariot that lights each day and coaxes forth all life? This is a miscarriage of mythology, for a woman's egg resembles nothing so much as the sun at its most electrically alive: the perfect orb, speaking in tongues of fire.
Doctor Maria Bustillo is a short, barrel-bodied woman in her mid-forties who frequently smiles small, private smiles, as though life dependably amuses her. She is a Cuban American. Her features are round but not pudgy, and she wears her dark hair neither short nor long. As an infertility expert, Bustillo is a modern Demeter, a harvester and deft manipulator of human eggs, a magician in a minor key. She helps some couples who are desperate for parenthood get pregnant, and to them she is a goddess. But others she cannot help. For those others, it is no metaphor to say they flush many thousands of dollars down the toilet with each cycle of IVF or GIFT or other prayers by alphabet. That is the reality of infertility treatment today, as we have read and heard and read again: it is very expensive, and it often fails. Nevertheless, Bustillo smiles her small amused smiles and does not coddle gloom. She manages to seem simultaneously brisk and easygoing. Her staff loves working with her; her patients appreciate her candor and her refusal to condescend. I liked her instantly and almost without qualification. Only once did she say something that reminded me, oh, yes, she is a surgeon, a wisecracking cowgirl in scrubs. As she washed her hands before performing a vaginal procedure, she repeated a smirking remark that she'd heard from one of her instructors years earlier. "He told me, Washing your hands before doing vaginal surgery is like taking a Shower before taking a crap," Bustillo said. The vagina is quite dirty, she continued, so there is nothing you could introduce into it with your hands that would be worse than what's already there. This bit of orificial wisdom, by the way, is an old husbands' tale, a load of crap, as we will discuss in Chapter 4. The vagina is not dirty at all. Really, is it too much for us who mount the gynecologist's unholy stirrups to ask, "Physician, clean thyself"?
I am visiting Bustillo at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York to look at eggs. I have seen the eggs of many species, but I have never seen the eggs of my own kind, except in pictures. Seeing a human egg is not easy. It is the largest cell in the body, but it is nonetheless very small, a tenth of a millimeter across. If you could poke a hole in a piece of paper with a baby's hair, you'd get something the size of an egg. Moreover, an egg isn't meant to be seen. The human egg, like any mammalian egg, is built for darkness, for spinning stories in visceral privacy, and you can thank that trait, in part, for your smart, fat, amply convoluted brain. An internally conceived and gestated fetus is a protected fetus, and a protected fetus is a fetus freed to loll about long enough to bloom a giant brain. So we lend new meaning to the term egghead: from the cloistered egg is born the bulging frontal lobe.
How different is the status of the sperm. A sperm cell may be tinier than an egg, measuring only a small fraction of the volume, so it is not exactly a form of billboard art either. Nevertheless, because it is designed to be externalized, publicly consumed, sperm lends itself to easy technovoyeurism. One of the first things Anton van Leeuwenhoek did after inventing a prototype of the microscope three hundred years ago was to smear a sample of human ejaculate onto a glass slide and slip it under his magic lens. And men, I will set aside my zygotic bias here to say that your sperm are indeed magnificent when magnified, vigorous, slaphappy, whip-tailed tears, darting, whirling, waggling, heading nowhere and everywhere at once, living proof of our primordial flagellar past. For mesmerizing adventures in microscopy, a dribble of semen will far outperform the more scholastically familiar drop of pond scum.
A woman's body may taketh eggs away by apoptosis, but it giveth not without a fight. How then to see an egg? One way is to find an egg donor: a woman who is part saint, part lunatic, part romantic, part mercenary, and all parts about to be put under the anesthesia that Bustillo calls the "milk of amnesia," so she will not feel her body crying bloody hell on the battlefield.
Beth Derochea pats her belly and booms, "Bloated! I'm full of hormones! I tell my husband, Stay away!" She is twenty-eight but looks a good five years younger. She is an administrative assistant at a publishing company who hopes to work her way up to an editing position. Her hair is long, dark, parted on the side, casual, and her smile is slightly gappy and toothy. "I hope nobody inherits my teeth!" she says. "Anything but that, I've got really weak teeth." Derochea is a woman of gleeful, elaborated extroversion; even being in a flimsy hospital gown doesn't make her act shy or tentative. She bounces; she laughs; she gestures. "She's so good!" a nurse in the room exclaims. "I'm so broke," Derochea says. "I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but I'm in debt." That's one of the reasons she's here, at Mount Sinai, to donate eggs, her pelvis tender, her ovaries swollen to the size of walnuts when normally they would be almonds, tubing about to be slipped into her nostrils to bathe her in milky amnesia.
If somebody were to design a line of fertility fetishes, Beth Derochea could be the model. Clips of her hair or fingernails could be incorporated into the amulets as saints' parts are encased in reliquaries. This is her third time at playing egg donor. She gave eggs twice during graduate school, and each time she yielded up a bumper crop of twenty-nine or so. Now she is back, in part for the fee of $2,500. But only in part. There are other reasons that she doesn't mind, even enjoys, donating eggs. She and her husband don't yet have children of their own, but she told me she likes playing mama. She mothers her friends; she urges them to dress warmly in the winter and to eat their fruits and vegetables. She likes changing diapers on other people's babies and rocking the infants to sleep. She likes the idea of her seed seeding other people's joy. She doesn't feel proprietary about her gametes. A fan of science fiction of the eggheaded variety, she tells me about something that Robert “A.” Heinlein once wrote. “Your genes don't belong to you, he said. They belong to all humanity. I really believe that My eggs, my genes, they're not even something that's me, they're something I'm sharing. It's like donating blood."
By this generous, almost communistic imagery, we are all aswim in the same great gene pool, or fishers from the river of human perpetuity. If my line comes up empty, perhaps you will share your catch with me. For such reasons of heart and Tightness, Derochea said she would donate eggs even if she weren't paid. "I might not have done it three times, but I definitely would have done it at least once," she says.
Her sentiment is rare. In many European countries, where it is illegal to pay a woman for donating eggs, almost nobody does it. Bustillo said that when she attended a conference on bioethics recently, the audience of doctors, scientists, lawmakers, and professional ponderers was asked, just out of curiosity, whether anybody there would donate eggs. "Nobody raised her hand," Bustillo said. "Though two people later said they'd consider doing it for a relative or good friend." Derochea is not donating eggs for relatives or friends. She never meets the couples who receive her eggs, she will never see any progeny that might come of them, and she doesn't care. She doesn't moon over sequelae, she doesn't fantasize about her mystery children. "I've managed to disengage myself from any sense of investment," she says, as calm as a Renaissance madonna.
I say to Bustillo that it's a good thing the best egg donors, women at the peak of their fertility, in their early thirties or younger, are at a point in life when they are likeliest to need the cash. An egg donor earns every dime of her blood money. Three weeks before I met her, Derochea had begun injecting herself with Lupron, a synthetic version of gonadotropin-releasing hormone, a potent chemical bred in the brain that begins the entire cycle of egg-dropping. For a week she injected herself nightly in the thigh with a narrow needle of the type diabetics use. No big deal, she said. Barely noticeable. Uh-huh, I said, thinking, Oh, sure, sure, anybody could do it, anybody except me, who's always thought the worst thing about heroin addiction is not the way it ruins your life or may give you AIDS but that you have to inject yourself with a needle.

After the Lupron came the hard stuff. She had to switch to a double-barreled shot of Pergonal and Metrodin, a mix of ovulatory hormones designed to spur the ovaries into a state of hyperactivity. Pergonal, incidentally, is isolated from the urine of postmenopausal women, whose bodies have become so accustomed to the menstrual cycle that they generate ovulatory hormones in extremely high concentrations because of a lack of feedback from the ovaries. Preparing this sweet brew demanded concentration, to assure that as she pulled the fluid into the hypodermic syringe, no potentially embolizing bubbles were pulled up with it. She also needed to use a much heavier-gauge needle than she did for the Lupron, which means a bigger and more painful shot. This time Derochea had to aim for the rear part of her hip, every night for about two weeks. Not terrible, not an ordeal, but something she admitted she wouldn't want to do each month. Toward the end of this non-ordeal, to stimulate the final stage of ovulation, Derochea gave herself a single shot of human chorionic gonadotropin, again through an ominously large hypodermic.
All the while, between nightly inoculations, she had to return repeatedly to the hospital for sonograms, to check on the expansion of her ovaries. She thickened with excess fluid and jested about her snappishness. When I talked to her, she was more than ready to give up her grams of flesh. Her two ovaries were like overstuffed sacks of oranges, each orange an egg ripened with unnatural haste by three weeks of hormone treatments. In a normal cycle, only one egg would be pushing its way from its ovarian pocket. But at the moment Derochea was an Olympic cycler, and two or three years' worth of oocytic offerings had been condensed into a single month. There's no evidence that she has lost those years, that her childbearing potential has in any way been compromised or truncated. We are, after all, overbudgeted with eggs, and think of what management does at the end of the fiscal period to budgets that don't get used: ha-ping! So the medical Demeters of the world simply cannibalize what otherwise would apoptose into the void.
In any event, fertility fetishism runs in Derochea's family: all of her siblings have already reproduced repeatedly. "Having babies is just something we do," she says. Derochea also doesn't worry about the risk of ovarian cancer, which some experts have proposed is heightened by the use of fertility drugs. The data on this question remain inconclusive, and in any case are more associated with the drug Clomid than with any of the follicular stimulants that Derochea has received. "If my family had a history of ovarian cancer, I'd be more concerned about it," she says. "But at this point, I'm not worried. Maybe that's stupid, but I'm not worried."
She lies down on the operating table. They pump her first with oxygen, then with anesthesia. They ask her if she's sleepy yet. "Mrrph!" she mumbles. A moment later she's as limp as a Dali clock. The surgical assistants stick her legs in stirrups and douse her genitals with iodine, which looks like menstrual blood as it dribbles along the inner folds of her thighs and onto the table. Bustillo barrels into the room, washes her hands, and jokes about crap and vaginas, but no matter, she scrubs. She sits down at the end of the table, at the gynecologist's stirrup-side post, ready for one of the easier breaches of the body's barrier. Her assistants wheel a portable ultrasound machine over to the table and hand her the ultrasound probe, an instrument shaped like a dildo. She slips a stretchy latex casing over the probe, "the condom!" she says, and threads a needle through the device that will suck the readied eggs from their pockets.
Bustillo inserts the wand into Derochea's vagina and up into one of the two fornices, the culs-de-sac of the vaginal canal that pouch up around either side of the cervix. The needle pierces the fornix wall, moves across the pelvic peritoneum, the oily membrane that surrounds most of the abdominal viscera, and finally perforates the ovary. Bustillo does the entire extraction procedure by watching the ultrasound screen, where the image of the ovary looms in black and white, made visible by bouncing high-frequency sound waves. Coming in on the top lefthand side of the screen is the needle. The ovary looks like a giant beehive honeycombed with dark bloated egg pockets, or follicles, each measuring two millimeters across. These are all the follicles that were matured by Derochea's diligent nocturnal injections. The sonogram screen is full of them. Manipulating the needle-headed probe with her eyes fixed on the sonogram, Bustillo punctures every dark honeycomb and sucks all the fluid out of the follicle. The fluid travels down the tube of the probe and into a catchment beaker. You can't see the egg suspended in that fluid, but it's there. Immediately after the fluid has been extracted from the follicle, the pocket collapses in on itself and disappears from the screen. A few moments later it slightly distends again, this time with blood.
Prick! Prick! Prick! Bustillo pierces and vacuums out every follicle so quickly that the honeycomb seems alive with accordian motion: pockets fall in, reengorge with blood. Prick! Prick! Prick! It hurts vicariously to watch; I want to cross my legs in discomfort except that I'm standing up. One of the surgical assistants tells me that sometimes the women who have this procedure done demand that it be performed without anesthesia. They regret their choice. At some point they start screaming.
When the left ovary is picked clean of ripe eggs, Bustillo moves the probe over to the other vaginal fornix and repeats the maneuver on the right ovary. The entire bilateral pricking and sucking takes ten minutes or so. "Okay, that's it," Bustillo says as she withdraws the probe. A stream of blood flows from Derochea's vagina, like a fire set by a departing army. The nurses clean her up and start calling her name and shaking her arm to wake her. Beth! Beth! You're done, we're done, we've plucked you clean. Your genes are now floating in the communal pool in which another woman soon will immerse herself, seeking baptism with baby.
Back in the lab, Carol-Ann Cook, an embryologist, separates and counts the day's plunder: twenty-nine eggs, the same number harvested from Beth Derochea twice before. This woman's vineyards are fruitful! Cook prepares the eggs, these grapes of Beth, for fertilization with the sperm of another woman's husband, a woman who lacks viable eggs of her own.
The use of donor eggs for in vitro fertilization is one of the few promising things that have happened to the technique since its introduction in the 1970s. Most women who attempt IVF are nearing the end of their patience and fecundity. They are in their late thirties, early forties. For reasons that remain entirely opaque, the eggs of an "older" woman, and it annoys me to use that term for anybody under eighty, let alone my peers, have lost some of their plasticity and robustness. They don't ripen as readily, they don't fertilize as well, and once fertilized, they don't implant in the womb as firmly as the eggs of a younger woman do. Older women usually start by trying IVF with their own eggs. They are partial to their particular genomes, their molecular ancestry, and why not? There's little difference between a baby and a book, and it's usually best to write about what you know. So they go through what Beth Derochea went through, weeks of preparatory hormonal injections. At the other end, though, they give forth not dozens of eggs but perhaps three or four, and some of those may be barely breathing. The fertility gods do their best. They join the healthiest-looking eggs and a partner's sperm in a petri dish to form embryos. After two days or so, they deliver the embryos back to the woman by squirting the clusters of cells, afloat in liquid, through a thin tube inserted into the vagina, across the cervix, and into the uterus. No big deal: blink and you miss it. Alas, for the women too it's a case of blink and you lose it. In the vast majority of patients, the technique fails. The chance of an older woman giving birth to a baby conceived from her eggs through IVF is maybe 12 to 18 percent. If you heard that these were your odds of surviving cancer, you'd feel very, very depressed.
An older woman may try IVF once or twice, even a third time, but if by then she hasn't conceived with her own harvest of DNA, she probably never will. At that point a doctor may recommend donor eggs, combining the seeds of a younger woman with the sperm of the older woman's husband, or lover or male donor, and then implanting the resulting embryo in said senior's uterus. Using donor eggs can make a woman of forty act like a twenty-five-year-old, reproductively speaking. Who knows why? But it works, oh girl does it work, so well that suddenly you're no longer in the teens of probability but instead have about a 40 percent chance of giving birth in a single cycle of in vitro maneuvers. That number starts to sound like a real baby bawling. If the wine is young enough, it seems, the bottle and its label be damned.
And so the egg rules the roost. It, not the womb, sets the terms of tomorrow. Carol-Ann Cook takes one of Derochea's eggs and puts it under a high-powered microscope, which transmits the image to a video monitor. "This is a beautiful egg," Bustillo says. "All her eggs are beautiful," Cook adds. They are eggs from a healthy young woman. They have no choice but to shine.
To think of the egg, think of the heavens, and of weather. The body of the egg is the sun; it is as round and as magisterial as the sun. It is the only spherical cell in the body. Other cells may be shaped like cinched in boxes or drops of ink or doughnuts that don't quite form a hole in the middle, but the egg is a geometer's dream. The form makes sense: a sphere is among the most stable shapes in nature. If you want to protect your most sacred heirlooms, your genes, bury them in spherical treasure chests. Like pearls, eggs last for decades and they're hard to crush, and when they're solicited for fertilization, they travel jauntily down the fallopian tube.
Carol-Ann Cook points out the details of the egg. Surrounding the great globe that glows silver-white on the screen is a smear of what looks like whipped cream, or the fluffy white clouds found in every child's sketch of a sky. This is in fact called the cumulus, for its resemblance to a cloud. The cumulus is a matting of sticky extracellular material that serves to bind the egg to the next celestial feature, the corona radiata. Like the corona of the sun, the corona of the egg is a luminous halo that extends out a considerable distance from the central orb. It is a crown fit for a queen, its spikes and phalanges emphasizing the unerring sphericity of the egg. The corona radiata is a dense network of interlocking cells called nurse cells, because they nurse and protect the egg, and it may also act as a kind of flight path or platform for sperm, steering the rather bumbling little flagellates toward the outer coat of the egg. That thick, extracellular coat is the famed zona pellucida, the translucent zone, the closest thing a mammalian egg has to a shell. The zona pellucida is a thick matrix of sugar and protein that is as cunning as a magnetic field. It invites sperm to explore its contours, but then it repels what doesn't suit it. It decides who is friend and who is alien. The zona pellucida can be considered the mother lode of biodiversity, the place where speciation in nature often begins, for it takes only a minor change in the structure of its sugars to make incompatible what before was connubial. The genes of a chimpanzee, for example, are more than 99 percent identical to ours, and it is possible that if the DNA of a chimpanzee sperm cell were injected directly into the heart of a human egg, the artificial hybridization would produce a viable, if ethically repulsive, embryo. But under the natural constraints of sexual reproduction, a chimpanzee sperm could not breach the forbidding zona pellucida of a human egg.
The zona also thwarts the entry of more than one sperm of its own kind. Before fertilization, its sugars are open and genial and seeking similar sugars on the head of a sperm. Once the zona has attached to the head of a sperm, it imbibes the sperm, and then it stiffens, almost literally. Its sugars turn inward. The egg is sated; it wants no more DNA. Any sperm that remain at its threshold soon will die. Still, the zona's task is not through. It is thick and strong, an anorak, and it protects the tentative new embryo during the slow descent down the fallopian tube and into the uterus. Only when the embryo is capable of attaching to the uterine wall, a week or so after fertilization, does the zona pellucida burst apart and allow the embryo to join its blood with mother blood.
The corona, cumulus, and zona all are extracellular, auxiliaries to the egg but not the egg. The egg proper is the true sun, the light of life, and I say this without exaggeration. The egg is rare in the body and rare in its power. No other cell has the capacity to create the new, to begin with a complement of genes and build an entire being from it. I said earlier that the mammalian egg is not like a bird's egg, insofar as it lacks the nutrients to sustain embryonic development. A mammalian embryo must tether itself to the mother's circulatory system and be fed through the placenta. But from a genetic perspective, the cytoplasm of a mammalian egg is complete, a self-contained universe. Somewhere in its custardy cytoplasm are factors, proteins, or bits of nucleic acid, that allow a genome to stir itself to purpose, to speak every word its species has ever spoken. These maternal factors have not yet been identified, but their skills have been showcased in sensational ways. When Scottish scientists announced in 1997 that they had cloned an adult sheep and named her Dolly, the world erupted with babble about human clones and human drones and God deposed. The endless exercises in handwringing resolved very little of the ethical dilemma that surrounds the prospect of human cloning, if dilemma there be. But what the sweet ovine face of Dolly demonstrates without equivocation is the wonder of the egg. The egg made the clone. In the experiments, the scientists extracted a cell from the udder of an adult sheep, and they removed the nucleus from the cell, the nucleus being the storehouse of the cell's genes. They wanted those adult genes, and they could have taken them from any organ. Every cell in an animal's body has the same set of genes in it. What distinguishes an udder cell from a pancreatic cell from a skin cell is which of those tens of thousands of genes are active and which are silenced.
The egg is democratic. It gives all genes a voice. And so the scientists harvested a sheep egg cell and enucleated it, taking the egg's genes away and leaving behind only the egg body, the cytoplasm, the nonyolk yolk. In place of the egg nucleus they installed the nucleus of the udder cell, and then they implanted the odd chimera, the manufactured minotaur, into the womb of another sheep. The egg body resurrected the entire adult genome. It wiped the slate clean, washed the milky stains from the dedicated udder cell, and made its old genes new again. Maternal factors in the egg body allowed the genome to recapitulate the mad glory of gestation, to recreate all organs, all tissue types, the sum of sheep.
The egg alone of the body's cells can effect the whole. If you put a liver cell or a pancreatic cell into a uterus, no infant would grow of it. It has the genes to make a new being, but it has not the wit. Small wonder, then, that the egg is such a large cell. It must hold the secrets of genesis. And perhaps the molecular complexity of the egg explains why we can't produce new eggs in adulthood, why we are born with all the eggs we will ever have, when men can sprout new sperm throughout their lives. Scientists often make much of the contrast between egg and sperm, the prolificacy and renewability of the man's gametes compared to the limitations and degradative quality of a woman's eggs. They speak in breathless terms of sperm production. "Every time a man's heart beats, he makes a thousand sperm!" Ralph Brinster burbled to the Washington Post in May of 1996. But a woman is born with all the eggs she'll ever have, he continued, and they only senesce from there. Yet the mere ability to replicate is hardly cause for a standing ovation. Bacteria will double their number every twenty minutes. Many cancer cells can divide in a dish for years after their founder tumors have killed the patient. Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much. Eggs must plan the party. Sperm only need to show up, wearing top hat and tails, of course.
 

Two. THE MOSAIC IMAGINATION.
UNDERSTANDING THE "FEMALE" CHROMOSOME.
KEITH AND ADELE fought all the time, like a pair of tomcats, like two drunken lumberjacks. Keith would find grist for the arguments in his reading. He read widely and thirstily, and sometimes he would come across a stray fact that fed his theorizing about the natural cosmology of male and female. Males are the seekers, he had decided, the stragglers and the creators; they build all that we see around us, the artifactual world of towering cities and invented divinity, yet they suffer for their brilliance and busyness. Females are the stabilizers, the salve for man's impatient expansionism, the mortar between bricks. Nothing surprising there: it's a familiar dialectic, between the doers and the be-ers, the seethers and the soothers, complexity and simplicity.
Then one day Keith read about chromosomes. He read that humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes and that the pairs of chromosomes are the same in men and in women, with the exception of pair number 23, the sex chromosomes. In that case, women have two X chromosomes and men have one X and one Y. Moreover, a woman's two X chromosomes look pretty much like all her other chromosomes. Chromosomes resemble X’s. Not when they're inside the cells of the body, at which point they're so squashed and snarled together they resemble nothing so much as a hair knot. But when they're taken out of the cell and combed apart for viewing under a microscope by a geneticist or a lab technician who is checking a fetus's chromosomes as part of amniocentesis, they look like fat and floppy X’s. So women have twenty-three pairs, or forty-six, of these X-shaped structures, while men have forty-five X’s and that one eccentric, the Y chromosome. The Y physically resembles the letter it was named for, being stubby and tripartite and quite distinct in shape from all the other chromosomes in the cell.
It struck Keith that even on a microscopic level, even as inscribed in the genetic clay from which human beings are constructed, men demonstrate their edge over women. Women have as their sex chromosomes two Xs: monotony. The story we've heard before. Men have an X and a Y: diversity. Genetic innovation and an escape from primal tedium. The Y as synecdoche for creativity, for genius. And so he said to Adele, The chromosomes prove the case for male superiority. You have two Xs and hence are dull, while I have an X and a Y and am accordingly interesting.
Neither Adele nor Keith knew much about genetics, but Adele knew enough to recognize mental manure when she smelled it. She dismissed his theory with a sneer. He grew angry at her refusal to submit to his logic. The argument escalated, as their arguments always did. Keith wasn't talking about all men, of course, but about himself. He was insisting that his needs and insights took precedence over Adele's, and that she acknowledge as much. She refused to surrender.
Of the many arguments that my parents had in the theater of our apartment before the reluctant audience of their children, this is the only one whose substance I remember. The clash of the century, Y versus X. I remember it in part because it seemed so oddly theoretical, and because it was the first time I heard an argument put forth for all around, across-the-board male dominance. I took it personally. My feelings were hurt. It was one thing for my father to attack my mother, that I was accustomed to. But there he was, describing all females, including me, as chromosomal bores.
The chromosome case remains very much open, a source of irritation and debate. In some ways, sex is fundamentally determined by the sex chromosomes. If you're female, you're assumed to have a pair of X’s tucked into just about every cell of your body, along with a set of those twenty-two other pairs of chromosomes. If you're a male, you know of your Y and you just might be proud of it, as your molecular phallus, and for the koanic wordplay of it: Y? Why? Why? Y! The sex chromosomes tell a technician, and you the parent, if you choose to know, whether the fetus under scrutiny in an amniocentesis screen is a girl or a boy.
So in one sense the demarcation between X and Y is clear, clean, an inarguable separation between femaleness and maleness. And my father was right about the predictability and monochromaticky of the female chromosomal complement. Not only will you find two X chromosomes in every body cell of a woman, from the cells that line the fallopian tubes to the cells in the liver and brain, but break open an egg cell and look within the nucleus, and you'll find one X chromosome in each (again with the other twenty-two chromosomes). It is indeed the sperm cell that can add diversity to an embryo, and that determines the embryo's sex by delivering either another X, to create a female, or a Y chromosome, to make a male. X marks the egg. An egg never has a Y chromosome within it. An ejaculate of sperm is bisexual, offering a more or less equal number of female and male whip-tailed sperm, but eggs are inherently female. So in thinking again about the mirrors into infinity, the link between mother and daughter, the nesting of eggs within woman within eggs, we can go a step further and see the continuity of the chromosomes. No maleness tints any part of us gals, no, not a molar drop or quantum.
But of course it is not that simple. We are not that simple, appealing though the idea of a molecularly untainted matriline may be. Let us consider the nature of the sex chromosomes, the X counterpoised against the Y. To begin with, the X is bigger, much, much bigger, both in sheer size and in density of information. The X chromosome is in fact one of the largest of the twenty-three chromosomes that humans cart around, and is about six times larger than the Y, which is among the tiniest of the lot (and it would be the smallest of all if it didn't have some nonfunctional stuffing added to it just to keep it stable). Gentlemen, I'm afraid it's true: size does make a difference.
In addition, many more genes are strung along the female chromosome than along its counterpart, and it is as a shoetree for genes that a chromosome takes on its meaning. Nobody knows exactly how many genes sit on either the X or the Y chromosome; nobody yet knows how many genes, in total, a human being has. Estimates range from 68,000 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 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 biologist