| Text in this article is copyright 1990-2005 by David Sheerin Gaus. Some has appeared in other formats. |
| A simple way to consider the matter is to draw a circle on a sheet of scrap paper. Finished? Many viruses are roughly spherical in shape, so the circle you have drawn can represent a virus. Inside the virus is DNA or RNA, which must exit the virus if the virus is to reproduce. Place your pen at where "one" or "two" would be marked on a clock on the circumference of your circle. Draw an arrow outward from that one or two hours position on the circle. The arrow is to indicate that the DNA or RNA must leave the virus. But that gives you the symbol for the male sex. Of course, that isn't a lab experiment. But I've recently been reading The Oxford History of Western Philosophy (*), and I found from that that I'm a Platonist in advancing the idea that all viruses are male. That is, "All viruse are male," isn't an empirical statement. Instead, it's based simply on logic. In the case of the symbol for the male gender, the logic is pictorial. Later in this article I'll explain why it might useful to know that all viruses are male. In that process, we will describe our efforts to publicize the idea and also give the results of our initial survey of biologists, microbiologists, and medical people on the question of virus gender. CONTINUE |
| * The Oxford History of Western Philosophy (edited by Anthony Kenny, Oxford University Press, 1994) |