Human Males Evolve At a Faster Pace Than Females

Tisha_AH writes "A report by the Whitehead Institute indicates that the human Y chromosome present in males is evolving at a furious pace. Across the chromosome there can be as much as a 33% difference within humans alone. The portions of the chromosome evolving fastest are related to sperm production."

Comments

Re:Does this change other predictions?

[metamechanical]

From the very first paragraph of the article:

Contrary to a widely held scientific theory that the mammalian Y chromosome is slowly decaying or stagnating, new evidence suggests that in fact the Y is actually evolving quite rapidly through continuous, wholesale renovation.

Re:Males are not a population

[Tony]

Right, but the gene distribution present within the population is indicative of the changes in genotype within the population.

The notion of evolving males is not silly. That's why peacocks have big bright displays, while peahens are boring brown. (This is even within the wild population of peacocks.)

This is called "sex selection," and Darwin wrote extensively about it.

Old News...

[kyriosdelis]

This has been known for a long time. It is called "male driven evolution". This happens because in humans (and most animals) the cells producing sperms divide about 6 times more than the egg cells. And guess what: studies in a human gene that has a homologue in both X and Y chromosomes, showed that (you guessed it) the Y homologue changes about 6 times faster than the X one.
Did I say old news? 1947 old:
“The primordial oocytes are mostly if not all formed at birth, whereas spermatogonia go on dividing throughout the sexual life of a male. So if mutation is due to faulty copying of genes at a nuclear division, we might expect it to be commoner in males than females.”
“ we should expect higher mutability in the male to be a general property of human and perhaps other vertebrate genes.”
J. B. S. Haldane. 1947. The mutation rate of the gene for haemophilia and its segregation ratios in males and females. Ann. Eugen. 13:262-271.

Re:I thought the Y chromosome contained nothing

[Sciros]

If the Y contained nothing, then males would inherit exactly zero traits from their fathers.

That bit is wrong... fathers provide 23 chromosomes in total, just like mothers. Daughters inherit plenty of traits from their fathers, after all, and they don't have a Y chromosome.

Re:Males are not a population

[Dishevel]

Maybe not. The article clearly states though that in this case the Y chromosome is evolving faster. That chromosome is only present in males. So. Males of the human species are evolving faster than the females at this time. These are very simple facts. Only made muddy and complicated by the fact that saying so sounds politically incorrect and as such can not be left alone as fact and must be downplayed.

God I hate this kind of shit