While intersex animals are often infertile and unable to produce offspring to help a population grow, Beans Velocci, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the history of sex classification, says that in social species such as whales, intersex animals likely play important nonreproductive roles that benefit the population in other ways.
Studying intersex animals has helped scientists better understand how genes and hormones shape individuals as they develop. Through the process of domesticating livestock, people have known about intersex cows for thousands of years. On Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, islanders nurture a unique strain of intersex pigs prized for their delicate spiraling tusks.
More recently, researchers have also documented intersex horses, dogs, moose, sheep, fish, and many different types of invertebrates. Intersex animals are rare across species but they’re “more common than we historically thought,” says Carla Crossman, a graduate student at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.
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As far as chromosomes are concerned, we have observed genotypes involving XXX, XXY, XYY and X0 (Turner syndrome) sex chromosomes. And we've observed human phenotypes with a range from no functioning sex organs to varying amounts of male & female sex organs on the same individual (these are often called intersex). Genetic mosaicism chimerism is where the X and Y chromosomes are expressed differently (from the most common expression) on different parts of the body (these phenotypes are also often described as intersex and sometimes hermaphrodite). Then there's androgen insensitivity syndrome. These are all observable biological phenomena that either God or Nature brings into the human family.
