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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."
This is what happens when you have 3.5 Billion years of hacks. Legacy code, no overall architecture and absolute chaos.
Let's start over and redesign humans from the ground up.
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."
No, it's just bad science journalism. The X chromosome is, for the most part, just another part of the genome; it contains all sorts of random junk, like blood clotting factors and parts of the receptors in our eyes that let us see colour. Any disease you've ever heard of that's "X-linked" or more common in men than women is either affected or effected, directly or indirectly, by the X chromosome. It is of no significance or note whatsoever that it contains stuff that's only activated in the male body.
If you want something weird and sex-linked to rant insanely about, however, there's always the mystery of digit ratio.
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Otherwise there would be very little genetic diversity between father and
son regarding fertility, and we know that to be false.
Behind every running man, there is a woman with an axe.
It just means men are females that have been suppressed. We're the victims here!
The Y chromosome is a li'l runt and they think it won't even be there anymore in a hunnert thousand years or so.
I don't think there's anyone who takes this seriously any more. There were some people suggesting that if genes are lost at a linear rate off the Y chromosome, it should disappear in another 10 million years. However, chimpanzees and humans show no difference in the number of genes on the Y chromosome since we diverged 6-7 million years ago, and we've both only lost one gene since we diverged from the rhesus macaque 25 mya. Given that sequencing of the platypus genome puts the common mammalian Y chromosome at a max of age of 166 mya, this suggests the linear model is just wrong.
The Wikipedia has good article on this from which I drew my numbers, if you're interested in more.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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
That the basic body plan is female to start with. I mean why else would men have nipples too?
And look at differences in the reproductive organs of men and women. Testes and Ovaries - just small deviations create each, and of course location.
It's significant from a health and evolutionary perspective. X inactivation in women makes expression of these genes mosaic which can prevent disease as well as cause some interesting immune responses. A gene can be beneficial in a pair but fatal solo which creates an interesting evolutionary tradeoff. If a woman can't have sons, is that a significant evolutionary disadvantage?
And behind every great woman, there's a man. Staring at her ass.
>> 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.
It's not a trait that lasts very long; every successive daughter has a 50% chance of passing it on afterwards, after all, so at most you'd expect such a mutation to only be around for three or four generations.
However, such diseases are probably the reason why women make up 51% of the population. In the stereotypical portrayal of hunter-gather societies, certainly it is desirable to have slightly more women than men; the traditional division of responsibilities leaves the women with more consistent work. Contrariwise it would seem that an agrarian society would benefit more from a surplus of men to work fields, but there are relatively few adaptations in our genomes that are agriculture-oriented. (Cavities, for example, are a symptom of eating grains.)
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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!