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Comment by Taniwha | Hacker News Reader

yes it is, and in this case I think we're probably still figuring out the actual cause

But one assumes that in this case the cause might be that the pheromones that people all hopped up on testosterone give off is different those given off by people who aren't .... those people would likely be cis-males, trans-males who've transitioned, trans-females who haven't transitioned, and some trans people who are currently transitioning in either direction .... we don't really have one exact word that encompasses those categories

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What if it's just plain old XX vs XY chromosomes?

So rats have a built in gene sequencer and detect the base pairs directly?

Your friend's eye color is defined by some genes. You don't need a gene sequencer to see what they are.

(S)he can be wearing contact lens, though.

And the researchers can be taking drugs changing their smell, possibly changing the mice behaviour.

Right, but wehat you detect is the eye colour, not the genes that cause it. Similarly with the rats they detect the pheromones in a male's smell, not the XY chromosomes. So suggesting they detect the XY chromosomes isn't helpful.

To see the color you mean?

No, the color of irides.

Probably not, but why is that so far fetched? They'd just need to be dissolving it with chemicals, backed up by a neural network to identify the sequence (rat's brain, anyone?). That's kind of how smell works in general to begin with.

As for why rats may develop the ability to sequence XX vs XY - if rats with the ability to do so were killed far less than those without, then rats would quickly evolve the ability to do so. This could happen if males were the ones killing rats and not females. Actually, skip the 'probably not' I began with - it's a perfectly likely explanation that may or may not be true based on further study.

Or there could be a signaling molecule specific to sex that directly interacts with some receptive system in the animal. Maybe it's nose? DNA sequencing would be an awfully slow signal given the technology available to the organism...

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