Curious. Would you allow for individuals in partnership to take a more dominant or submissive role in their relationship with each other, so long as this was not a coerced or forced state? Sort of. Or to put it another way, egalitarianism is concerned with working to maintain equality for all people; feminism is specifically concerned with issues regarding women (although my understanding is that it's branched out somewhat). They aren't so much different as the one is more focused than the other.
I have been toying with the idea of a three gendered species where the is a Male a Placental Female and a Marsupial Female. In this species the Males information comes from the sperm. The Placental Females information comes from the Ova and the information from the Marsupial Female comes in the first milk. As for the childs development after fertalisation by the Male the Placential Female carries the embrio up to the 3rd month then she gives birth and passes yhe child to the Marsupial Female who puts the embryo now called a fetus into her pouch where it attatcces itself to one of her brests to suckell untill it is 15 months old and volentaraly leaves the pouch. When the child starts to suckel the milk at the start is the first milk and provides the 3rd gammate. All gammates from the Placental Female have an X 23rd Chromosome Male Gammates produce either an X Y or Z 23rd Gammate.Marsupial Females produce no gender information. I may laler give more specialized names to thne2 Female genders
I really doubt that a third gamete could be added as late as the phase where the neonate enters the marsupial pouch. By then, development would've progressed quite far, relatively speaking. However, there's a lot more to biology than just genes. We're just starting to understand how important epigenetic factors are to development. The DNA is the basic programming code, but it's the epigenetic factors that determine how that code is presented, read, and expressed. For instance, DNA strands are surrounded by things called nucleosomes, which basically twist the DNA into a particular shape in order to expose some genes and conceal others. Not so much rewriting the program as resetting its options, turning different parts of it on or off so that it operates differently. So maybe what a third, marsupial parent would contribute wouldn't be genetic coding per se, but an epigenetic mechanism that affected how the coding was expressed and moderated. So the way the neonate developed would be affected by the third parent even though its genetics came only from the first two.
well, obviously not since if it did we'd all be like amoebas and just split into two to reproduce. but, come on, three parents where one 'gives birth' and then a second carries it for months and suckles it? GTFOOH, that's just ridiculous. you wanna make a three gender species, make it so they combine their material at the intercourse stage.
I'm just thinking of cuckoos, who lay an egg in another bird's nest, even a tiny species, and the baby cuckoo hatches out, kicks the birds' own egg out of the nest, and is raised by the substitute parents.
Nature is full of all sorts of strange variants on reproduction. Read up on seahorses sometime. Evolution doesn't have a fixed playbook. It's a process of adaptation to the needs of a species' environment and lifestyle. You can't rule out the possibility that there could be an environment that would create pressures for which a three-parent system would be adaptive. For instance, if a high birth rate is needed, then handing the job of suckling off to a third parent would mean the birthing parent would be able to get pregnant again sooner. Also, the reason two-sex reproduction caught on is because it increases genetic diversity and adaptability. On our planet, two sexes is enough. On a different planet, with a more stressful environment, it's possible that two wouldn't be enough, that you'd need the additional diversity that comes from a larger number of sexes.
c'mon though Therin, that's different and you know it. the cuckoo still gets knocked up and lays its egg in the conventional 2-gendered manner.
But that manner is only "conventional" because that's the course life has taken on this planet. On an alien world, with unknown conditions? There are all sorts of reproductive directions life could take.
Sure, but you said that the situation of "a second carries it for months and suckles it" was ridiculous. Not so ridiculous or impossible. Christopher already beat me to the seahorse example, in which the male fertilizes the young, and the female passes the young into the male's pouch. There's also clownfish(?), which can change sex to even up the numbers in the school, and baby crocodiles, which hatch out either male or female depending on how deep the mother buries the eggs. Not to mention hermaphrodite pairs of snails, who fertilize each other's eggs. With all that variety here on Earth I'm willing to cut as-yet-undiscovered species some slack and assume they might have more than two genders, no sexes.
^Or rather, more than two sexes. Sex is biological; gender is cultural or behavioral. They aren't the same thing. For instance, a transvestite is someone of, say, the male sex who adopts a female gender identity. There are human cultures with more than two genders, although they still have two biological sexes.