Do girls really have the X factor?

Have you been watching the X factor? Are the girls doing better than the boys? Well they should do because girls have double the X factor. That is to say female mammals have two X chromosomes whereas males have one X and one Y. What’s more, the X chromosome contains a thousand more genes than the Y. Hold on girls! Before you start your goal celebration routines it seems the female body switches off one X chromosome - quite randomly - in each cell, thus evening up protein production between the sexes. Our one chance to be the superior sex and nature decides to intervene!
So what does all this mean? Well did you realise that tortoiseshell cats - which are nearly always female - have a gene for one colour on one of their X chromosomes and a gene for another colour on the other X chromosome? This leads to the multicoloured patterning.
Also females are protected from many diseases because of their double dose of the X chromosome. A host of nasty diseases and disorders sit on the human X chromosome, including haemophilia. But because females have another - usually healthy - copy of the X chromosome, they are usually shielded from the full impact of these disorders. Males, on the other hand, have nothing to fall back on.
But wait for this - although the average IQ of men and women is equal, men are more frequently found at both extremes of intelligence. In a nutshell, you’ve either got it – or you haven’t! This is because, if you have very good intelligence genes on your X chromosome, it pays not to have them muffled by more average genes on another X chromosome.
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