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X Chromosome May Leave a Mark On Male Fertility
sciencehabit writes "Behind every great man, the saying goes, there's a great woman. And behind every sperm, there may be an X chromosome gene. In humans, the Y chromosome makes men, men, or so researchers have thought: It contains genes that are responsible for sex determination, male development, and male fertility. But now a team has discovered that X—'the female chromosome'—could also play a significant role in maleness. It contains scores of genes that are active only in tissue destined to become sperm. The finding shakes up our ideas about how sex chromosomes influence gender and also suggests that at least some parts of the X chromosome are playing an unexpectedly dynamic role in evolution."
And where's the documentation?
The y chromosome doesn't code many genes at all, and this has been known for a long time. It's main function is turning specific genes off. Anatomy of all sorts, including gender characteristics is coded across all 24 chromosomes. The y just suppresses the female parts.
If I learn something over a decade ago in a high school class, it shouldn't be "science news."
Behind every running man, there is a woman with an axe.
The Y chromosome used to just be a variant of the X chromosome, with only a few genes different; they were the same size. Over time, careless maintenance staff decided the backups were redundant and stopped keeping them. Thus something like 5% of men have one or more factory defects—most commonly colour-deficient vision, which some backward engineer decided was a feature , not a bug, and went to great lengths to distribute bad copies to other users.
On the plus side, we recently found out that the genome actually does have some documentation—well, more like debugger symbols—so it's getting easier to figure out where the important binaries are located. Unfortunately in the process we also discovered that what appeared to be severe filesystem fragmentation is actually rotational performance optimization, and most of the rest of the disk is actually a messy broth of shell scripts, not merely unallocated space as we assumed.
The sad thing is that even if we did redesign everything, it would probably be way worse than the existing codebase, particularly since we only have a tiny portion of the actual spec, which you can imagine was never exactly written down.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Some of those feminists make even stupider arguments. It's perfectly alright for women to cooperatively solve problems together, but add a man to the equation, and the solution becomes "sexist".
If a gang of women need to pass through a door that is difficult to open, the strongest woman present will probably pull the door open, and the least strong women in the gang will duck through as quickly as possible. If a man and a feminist need to pass through that door, if the man opens and holds the door for the feminist, he is sexist. We have basically the same solution to the same problem, but the sexist feminist refuses to acknowledge that the solution is the CORRECT solution.
MOST WOMEN will just accept this trivial act of consideration with a nod of gratitude, or a word of thanks, and go on about their business. SOME FEMINISTS will want to kick the man in the balls for being sexist.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
No feminist would ever make a stupid argument like this...
...And that sounds a lot like No True Scotsman.
Sadly, I've personally heard actual feminists make equally-stupid arguments. One particular instance I recall was discrediting a physical-fitness study because it separated male and female participants. The study's conclusion had nothing to do with gender differences, but segregating the samples eliminated a variable. That didn't matter to the opposing extremist, though. She argued that since the male and female results were separated, each group was therefore subject to different biases, and the whole study should be rejected because it was "clearly" just a piece of propaganda to further the myth that men are physically superior to women.
Of course, in the actual study, there were a good many outliers that overlapped. Speaking of outliers, there are also extremists on all sides of an argument, even the ones with supposed moral high ground. Such extremists should be ignored as an anomaly, and the real science can go on uninterrupted.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Like welfare queens, femnazis ruin it for all of us.
>> domestic violence
SIGNIFICANTLY more males than females are assaulted and killed in society every day.
Perhaps not by their partner, but overall in society.
>> education access
Girls have been outperforming boys in school for many years now.
Also for many years, many more girls have been going into higher education than boys.
>> maternal mortality
Don't even get me started on government health spending.
Women live longer than men, but significantly more is spent on female-specific health issues.
No, what most (not all, but most) feminists do is perpetuate the notion of victimhood amongst females, and most women swallow this hook, line and sinker.
But if you do the research -- I mean actually look at the numbers -- you'll see that males cop it far worse than females.
There's nothing wrong here; it's just a simple misunderstanding by the journalist. We've known about X-linked for as long we've known about sex chromosomes, which inherently implies that the X chromosome has responsibilities beyond determining sex.
Believe it or not, however, there are actually advantages to the Y chromosome being so minimal. Men are nature's beta testers: sometimes mutations in the X chromosome have significant benefits, and as these traits aren't balanced out by a second allele, they become more pronounced and hence are easier to detect during sexual and natural selection. This is (probably) why men display a greater variance in height, strength, and analytical skill. Similarly, by always suffering from a disease, and hence by not getting laid, men protect the rest of the tribe from the disorders they end up with. (Admittedly not great when you're actually in the middle of things, but sexual dimorphism and reproduction are both full of cruelties.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!