Origin Of Male And Female Symbols

ORIGIN OF MALE AND FEMALE SYMBOLS..!!

For over two hundred and fifty years, biologists have used the symbols ♂ for male and ♀ for female without really knowing, or caring, why.



1..

The Symbol for female ( ♀ ) derived from the hand mirror of VENUS , and the symbol of male( ♂ ) derived from the shield and spear of MARS..

2..

Long before biology was born, says Stearn—who borrowed his explanations from a 17th century French scholar—the ancient Greeks gave human qualities to the planets. Mars, the red planet, was considered male, and the Greek word for Mars, Thouros, was abbreviated to "Th," or α. In the hands of careless and hasty penmen, this symbol eventually degenerated into δ ( ♂ ). The same shorthand fate overtook the female planet, Venus, whose Greek name Phosphorus was reduced to Ph (Φ) ( ♀ )and subsequently—perhaps by the same careless Grecians—to ø. When medieval alchemists came upon these symbols, they found them useful: δ (Mars) was associated with hard iron, φ (Venus) with softer copper. Later, the symbols were adopted by Swedish Naturalist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), the father of modern systematic biology, who found them so aptly descriptive of the male and female gender that they are still used for the same purpose today.

3..

The male and female symbols adopted to represent the sexes in biological sciences can be traced back to the prehistoric rock engravings of the Mediterranean region representing human sexual parts. Leroi-Gourhan has already expressed this thought: “One can wonder if the realistic groups of human subjects are not the key to an evolution towards the abstracts signs