There are about six billion people in the world. But every person is unique. Some people have black eyes; others have brown eyes. Some have dark hair, others have light hair. Besides humans, there are millions of other living creatures. Some are so tiny that we simply can't see them with our own eyes. Whatever it is, every living creature is different from every other.// Why is each living thing unique? Where do its characteristics come from? Do people receive characteristics from their mothers or fathers, or both? Which characteristics do they receive? How? These are some of the questions that biologists try to answer. The work of a man by the name Mendel a hundred years ago was especially important.//Mendel studied plants, especially pea plants. Mendel decided that pea plants carried factors, and parents passed these factors onto their offspring. Today we call these factors genes. Genes are tiny pieces of matter that carry information from parents to offspring. // Based on Mendel's work, biologists began to ask such questions as “Can we apply our information about genes to people?” they discovered that in a person genes told whether he would have brown eyes or blue eyes, whether he would have dark hair or light hair. Now we know that every person is unique.//

The human brain contains an average of ten billion neurons or nerve cells, each of which is linked with one thousand to ten thousand other neurons. These nerve cells participate in countless electrical microcircuits which make possible thought, perception, communication, and other types of mental activity.// The outside surface of the brain, which is known as the cortex, consists of a thin wrinkled mantle of gray tissue made up of millions of neurons. This layer of the brain represents man's relatively recent evolutionary step in neurological development and is not present to a comparable degree in any other species.// The brain is divided into two roughly symmetrical hemispheres, sometimes called right and left brains. The activity of the two hemispheres is coordinated by a number of interconnecting nerve pathways. The two sides of the brain, while fairly comparable in size and form, appear to specialize in handling various tasks.// Current evidence suggests that the left and right hemispheres differ in some way in their function. For example, specialized linguistic and perceptual skills are each associated with a particular hemisphere of the brain. In most individuals, the left hemisphere has primary responsibility for language, while the right hemisphere controls visual and spatial skills as well as the perception of nonlinguistic sounds and musical melodies.//

For a woman, conventional beauty is her only attribute. She is supposed to have no lines or wrinkles, no scars or blemishes. She is thin, generally tall and long legged, and above all young. All beautiful women in television commercials conform to this norm. The image is artificial and can only be achieved artificially.// Many women go to great lengths to manipulate and change their faces and bodies. More than a million dollars is spent every hour on cosmetics in this country. A woman is conditioned to view her face as a mask and her body as an object, as things separate from and more important than her real self.// Adolescent females are also discouraged from growing up and becoming adult. Growing older is the great taboo. Although boys are allowed and encouraged to become mature adults, girls are encouraged to remain little girls, to be passive and dependent, never to mature. Someone placed in a double bind, they are supposed to be sexy and virginal, experienced and naive, seductive and pure.// Misleading advertisements and commercials depict a world in which love and passion are reversed solely for products, in which sexuality becomes a commodity, and in which young women are the worst victims.//