Everybody agrees that being socially skilled means—in part at least, nowadays—being sensitive to another person’s feelings. And most people would probably agree that women tend to be more socially skilled than men. What most people probably wouldn’t agree on is that the skill is genetically based. But last June child psychiatrist David Skuse of the Institute of Child Health in London and a team of psychologists and geneticists proposed exactly that: genetic information influencing social skills, they claim, lies somewhere on the X chromosome. Even more surprising, these skills seem to be handed off to women by the X chromosome they inherit not from their similarly gracious mothers but from their clueless fathers.
Skuse came to this tentative conclusion after studying 80 females with Turner’s syndrome, a genetic disorder in which a girl inherits only one X chromosome from either her mother or her father. Turner’s girls lack ovaries, but ...
