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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."
The cynical among us might say that we're finally catching up...
Males masturbate more than females, amirite?
Al least some scientific data ;-)
Very seriously, I had a feminist girlfriend that wouldn't believe a child sex was defined by the spermatozoid. According to her the female genitals were as much responsible for the sex of the child.
I guess this article explains everything, she needs more evolution in order to understand those advanced concepts ;-))
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I wonder if this would counter the other studies saying that the y chromosome is doomed.
Mod the whole article flamebait. The headline plays with the common association between "evolution" and "improvement" in order to gather angry responses and its fair share of taunting.
...at what they are looking for in a mate.
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You're correct, males do tend to generate more sperm than females...
-Matt
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Males are not an independent population. And individuals don't evolve, so the notion of evolving males is silly.
Evolution is something that happens in a population, not in an individual. The female part of out population likely benefits just as much from the continuous changes to the Y chromosome as the male part of the population. Evolutionary speaking, that is. It's unlikely any individual would really care.
"Darwin Award" winners are pretty overwhelmingly male.
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.
I don't mind dating a girl that has been with everybody, as long as she had a good shower afterwards.
Thousands of years of wars fought because of skin tone or beliefs when really we could have done it over +/- 1/2 tsp.
Err, Trojan War? That one has to count
(no, not the pun damnit, the historical one... :) )
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
testicle size in simians is correlated with female permissiveness. such that, in chimpanzees, where a female in estrus is pretty much a gangbang, chimpanzees males have evolved humongous testicles. they need to, because in such a situation, the only strategy available to the male to ensure his genetic continuance is to simply overwhelm other male's sperm with sheer ejaculate volume
meanwhile, in highly monogamous simians who mate for life, such as gibbons, the testicles are tiny. there's simply no need for so much ejaculate volume, its a waste of resources. she's not going anywhere
interestingly enough, human males have intermediate sized testicles, owing to the fact that human females are semi-monogamous/ semi-polygamous
however, i've always wondered why testicles appeared on the outside of the male mammalian body. it seems a ridiculous vulnerability and i've never heard a good explanation as to why. for example, dolphins aren't swimming around with their balls out: the need to be streamlined. of course sperm need a lower temperature to develop, but thats an effect, not a cause. i'm saying wouldn't it be better to have your testicles inside your body and evolve sperm that develop at a higher temperature? its pretty ridiculous to have such an important organ dangling outside unprotected. i never understood why
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yes... and no. The "differences" you mention are not hard, sharp divisions. They are bell curves with peaks in different places, but there is lots of overlap. Even in the realm of sheer upper-body strength, I guarantee that (unless you happen to be a champion powerlifter) there are are women who can outbench you.
It's not that differences don't exist. (They do, and vive la difference.) It's just they they are of a different kind, and a different size, and a different range, than you seem to understand.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Equating mechanical strength to physical superiority is specious. Overall survival value is the name of the game, and the physical strength of the strongest - or even average - individual doesn't speak to a survival advantage in modern or ancient society. The higher percentage body fat in female humans is a significant survival advantage in cold weather conditions, while the lower body mass and associated lower energy overhead can be the difference between starving exhaustion and mental and physical readiness. It's a complex issue and it was rather naive of you to announce a "winner" in a complex, argument-launching question on the basis of a single attribute.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Evolution does not require speciation, it requires adaptation to accommodate changing niches which may, but not necessarily will lead to speciation.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
I like basketball!!1!
You know the womens groups will come out that this is sexist? I swear it's like the religious groups who come out with their nonsense when science disproves one of their "theories" - you know like the earth is not flat, does not reside in the center of the universe, and is not approximately 6000 years old.
Perhaps if you didn't flamebait them at every opportunity that arose? I swear every damn article that talks about evolution has DOZENS of agnostic drones bitching about 'religious groups'. Wtf really... Is it really that bad someone doesn't believe what you do? They are not part of the borg so you call them out at every opportunity? Perhaps you act as bad as you accuse others of doing? Is this how you want to present yourself to others? Sounds like you (and your parents) also missed the point of being called to the principals office. You like to piss people off (btw that is not a good thing). Not what the article was about... So far my sample of 2 examples from your rant shows this about you.
But my little rant will not change your mind. You will just blunder on thru life wondering why everyone around you is an 'idiot'. Perhaps you need to reflect on what *YOUR* actions do to others.
Sorry to rant on you but the 6000 number is getting old. I would be willing to bet cold hard cash 99.9% of 'religious groups' do not even believe that number. You are generalizing what a fairly small group calculated out of the bible and what meme you heard on the internet about 'religious groups'.
Perhaps if you attended some 'religious groups' meetings you might get something from it instead of hatred (which is all I have seen from you so far). Here is what I have gotten out of it. You get out of life what you put into it. In life you make good choices and bad choices all the time. Ignore hatred it is self destructive and not helpful in life.
Are their loony jobs out there? Yes, they tend to exist in all groups. Just ask someone who collects every star wars memorabilia that exists. While the rest of us played with the toys a bit and then let it go. To give you an example my gf. Her first encounter with star trek was a dude who built his own klingon costumes. What sort of impression does that give to her? She will not watch star trek. She will not even give it a chance. Oh and I call her out on this too so you are not alone. Perhaps you do the same with other things in your life?
Many years ago, I read a serious genetics paper about this. The scientist managed to setup up a colony of fruit flys (drosophilia melanogaster) so that the females remained static - they did not evolve - and the males did.
In fruit flys, multiple males mate with a female, so there is a lot of competition between the different sperm.
What happened is that the males evolved their ejaculate to become more aggressive, to outcompete the other males; in some cases, the ejaculate became toxic to the females.
1st off i'm not going to cite stuff because i've not got it at hand and any citations would be from audio files. the recent courses i've listened to in biology and, more specifically, evolutionary biology suggest the y chromosome is a shrivelled up little thing fast loosing genes. as a guy i didn't much like hearing that either. there's some evidence in some flatworm species that 'penis fencing' suggests bearing young is an "aggressive act" foisted upon a weaker rival. how that would scale up to other species i couldn't say. there are recent findings that male sperm have complex mechanisms that try to induce the egg to draw down from the female as much developmental resources as possible while the egg has similar mechanisms that will try to limited the amount of resources a fertilised egg can demand of the mother. this seems to suggest that there's not only great complexity in development but that sperm and egg are in competition. it's very complex not yet nearly understood stuff. also a 'faster' rate of evolution isn't necessarily a sign of good things to come or an evolutionary edge. what i term differential evolution, for want of a better term, seems not to have been studied or made available to mere lay people such as myself. by differential evolution i mean what does it mean when a species evolves faster. does it simply mean the species has greater fitness? what are the consequences of 'faster' evolution and can such consequences be considered in anything but out of context, almost trivial generalities?
ideopath @ play
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Hell, they get the second X from Dad, so it's his fault she's a girl anyway!
Well, yeah, it says men are evolving faster... specifically, the Y-chromosome, and more specifically, it's related to sperm production.
Will they develop enhanced regeneration and adamantium claws?
In short, your junk is evolving. Not necessarily anything else. That MIGHT not be considered a complementary thing, depending on how you feel about your particular junk.
I feel pretty good about my "junk" but don't refer to them as junk. I am pretty sure they are holy...why my fiancee says oh god all the time...
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Somehow, the right female can devolve me right back into being a monkey.
That "6000" number may (you didn't provide data) only be touted by 0.1% of religious groups, but they are the loudest out there... the radial, vocal far right.
That number, and the whole Young Earth fairy tale, is a very recent invention. In the 1700s, there was no major Christan group (or any other Western Religion) espousing such nonsense. Various groups had once believed in a "young earth", but it has been soundly rejected by all of them, centuries ago. This is why most Europeans, even the devoutly religious, hear this stuff and do wonder about America.
This all started in the early 1800s, in the USA. William Miller, a New York farmer, came to believe that the Bible contained coded information, including the date of the "end of the world". This took form as the Seventh Day Adventist movement... followers of Miller organized and prepared for his calculated end of the world. He gained a national following in the mid 1800s, and finally named a final year, based on his calculations: 1843. I'm guessing he screwed up somewhere. Then it was somewhere between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. When that year passed by, he got out his pencil, did the calculations again, and pronounced the real date as April 18, 1844. After that passed, he posted a new date: October 22, 1844. Curiously, the world also didn't end then. This final one became know as "The Great Disappointment".
Anyway, curiously enough, this crazy person's religion did not fail based on these failures, but continued to grow, backed by followers... Miller himself went into seclusion. In 1923, George McCready Price, a Millerite and Seventh-day Adventist, wrote a book called "The New Geology" (he was not, in fact, a geologist), which established the earth at somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years old, and claimed "The Genesis Flood" responsible for many modern geological features of the earth. This one book pretty much started the ball rolling among this fringe types.
As for this not being a mainstream belief... true. But not as true as you think. In 2008, Gallop conducted a poll, that indicated 44% of US adults agreed with the statement "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so".
As for that number being thrown out... I understand this. I really don't care what various creatins believe, whether it's young earth, Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster... as long as they keep it to themselves. But these folks have had a very, very dangerous effect on the policies of the USA, at least during the eight years of the Bush Administration. This does not sit will with those of us, such as myself, who value science over superstition, logic over "what I feel in mah gut", etc.
-Dave Haynie
The Y and X chromosomes are not very similar at all. Even though the Y chromosome imaged in a karyotype does admittedly resemble about half of a chromosome, structurally, it's all there. There is a long and short arm with a centromere dividing them, just like the other chromosomes. The Y chromosome really is much smaller than the X, though. There are about 2000 genes on the X chromosome, and roughly 80 on the Y chromosome. Unlike the non-sex-determining chromosomes, there is almost no recombination between the X and Y (that is to say, the genes on each are not shared between the two).
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Evolution doesn't give us the best possible solution, just one which was "good enough" at some point in time. As a result we have spines which hurt, wrists which break easily when we try to protect us from a fall, women who become infertile long before they would lose the strength to carry a child, etc.
Male pattern baldness coming from the mother's side is a myth
http://ca.askmen.com/sports/health_60/92_mens_health.html
"It's called self-deprecating humor. I'm a male, so I get to make fun of men."
Assuming you're a man, saying "all men are stupid" deprecates you --- that's 1 person --- and 3 billion other people.
It's 3 billion times more *other*-deprecating than self-deprecating.
Not saying racist and sexist jokes aren't funny.
But they're not self-deprecating.
Needing the teller to belong to the group the joke targets, ain't about self-deprecation on the teller's part. It's about what sort of things an audience is prepared to listen to, and from whom.
"Evolving" might not be the right term. "Changing" might be better.
Except those are really the same thing.
Evolution is simply changes in allele distribution in a population over time. That's all it means. It doesn't have to involve mutation, and it doesn't even have to be towards better adaptation. Natural Selection is the mechanism by which these changes can be selected for or against according to their survival benefit and is why evolution generally tends toward better adaptation, but it needn't be so to be evolution. Even if it isn't a case of sexual selection either. Evolution simply means changes.
Any disadvantageous mutation quickly perish. Very few changes are beneficial.
Only if they are sufficiently detrimental (though many are, and "quickly" is usually while the organism is still a tiny bundle of cells). Also many changes can be mostly neutral and thus have no effect on survival -- if the organism can survive and reproduce, the changes were "good enough", even if we humans might be tempted to call them "disadvantageous". In the long term they may affect the success of the population with those changes, but maybe not.
If the rate of mutation increases rapidly, it is either due to intense environmental pressure, such as arriving on the Galapagos Island, or it is due to the fact that there is no environmental pressure on this genetic treat, and you survive either way. Literally Degeneration.
But if you survive to reproduce, then the changes in your genome weren't "bad". "Good" and "bad" are only in the context of the environment in which they are being tested. So "good" changes are ones that allow you to survive in that environment. But when the environment changes, then the notion of "good" and "bad" could change entirely, and not necessarily in the way that you might have pre-supposed.
"Degeneration" doesn't really mean anything in the context of evolution.
The enemies of Democracy are
Here is an example to illustrate. The facts can be discussed, but understand the point.
Human brainsize was limited to surviving natural birth. With c-section, this is not an issue, and any brainsize is OK. Since a big brain is a very good survival tool, in not too many generations all infants will have brains too big for natural birth, and can only survive with a c-section. This is certainly evolution, but since we understand and have created this environment artificially, we should also understand what it may cause in the future.
Gene therapy and other procedures allow a long list of fatal diseases(in the absence of modern medicine) to spread throughout the population. This is what I mean by degeneration.
Also, in the US, it looks like there is a strong selection to be a poor immigrant from latin america.
And a good education is certain extinction. Any graduate degree results in so few offspring and that branch of humans will be gone in a few centuries.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org