Y: The descent of men by Steve Jones, Little, Brown, 拢14.99, ISBN 031685615
MEN have a hard time at Christmas. Santa has to penetrate every home in the land in a desperate one-night swoosh. Dad has to tolerate a tie given with much love but less understanding. And it鈥檚 not just at Christmas. These days, men seem to have a hard time all the time. Can science help?
Well, yes and no. Geneticist Steve Jones鈥檚 brilliant new Y: The descent of men would make a great alternative to that tie, but its message could cause as much distress. Men, it seems, are the result of a trick played by an innocent asexual cell long ago. With one of their chromosomes reduced from healthy X to degenerate Y, they are nothing but parasites perpetuating their genes at least cost to themselves. Half of humanity might be better off without them.
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But Jones knows where science ends and speculation begins. Despite Dolly the sheep鈥檚 bleat of doom, suggesting that men will be redundant, he insists biologists know a lot about sex but next to nothing about gender. Manhood may be built on DNA, but its social manifestations, and therefore its future, he says, are not under molecular control. Scientists who forget that should be shown back to their box.
He also points out that men do have a use: they introduce women to women. Because every man carries his mother鈥檚 genes, children get genetic information from more women than just their mum. Mutations can spread, and evolution can get to work. That鈥檚 what sex is all about (this is science, remember). But there鈥檚 a twist. Women don鈥檛 have Y chromosomes, and men don鈥檛 have babies, so mutations in the Y get trapped in a single male line. This is good news for scientists studying human origins. Resulting revelations include the fact that Professor Jones, along with most of his fellow Welshmen, shares male kinship not with the Celts but with those fiercely independent inhabitants of Spain and France, the Basques.
This genealogical bombshell belies Jones鈥檚 claim that science can make the fascinating dull. As does his treatment of the most obvious legacy of those who copped a Y at conception. He provides an owner鈥檚 guide to its wayward hydraulics, and much about male concerns that go beyond a flop on the big night. Circumcision is still common, while castration is not all that rare and even sometimes voluntary. Men are clearly confused about sex.
Could animals provide a template for sexual behaviour undistorted by human culture? Jones takes a thorough look at the habits of birds (about which we know most) and primates (closest to us genetically), but concludes that animals, far from showing us the one best way, have simply tried almost everything you can think of. The current human pattern seems to be 鈥渞easonable fidelity with occasional lapses鈥� (although the latter, presumably, are not compulsory).
Perhaps because today鈥檚 market demands science books that look like novels, Y has no pictures or diagrams, and Jones鈥檚 considerable capacities as a wordsmith sometimes seem strained by concepts that would be better presented visually. Nevertheless, this is science communication at its best: up-to-date, authoritative, witty and packed with human interest. Not just a book for Christmas, and not just a book for blokes: required reading, too, for every woman who wants to know her enemy.