Female Supremacy Articles - Page 6

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July 10, 2003

Why, oh Y, are men so insecure?

The darlings have been fretting for some years now that they may be rendered unnecessary if women get financial and biological independence, learning how to reproduce and refinance without them.

What if nature played a cruel trick and demoted men, so they had to be judged merely by their appearance, pliability and talent for gazing raptly at the opposite sex, no matter how bored?

New research on the Y chromosome shows that my jittery male friends are not paranoid; they are in an evolutionary shame spiral.

As Nicholas Wade wrote in The New York Times: "Although most men are unaware of the peril, the Y chromosome has been shedding genes furiously over the course of evolutionary time, and it is now a fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome. The decay of the Y stems from the fact that it is forbidden to enjoy the principal advantage of sex, which is, of course, for each member of a pair of chromosomes to swap matching pieces of DNA with its partner."

Wade said that biologists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had made a remarkable discovery: "Denied the benefits of recombining with the X, the Y recombines with itself."

The ultimate guys' night out. Simply put, the Y chromosome figured out a way to save itself from extinction by making a difficult hairpin turn and swapping molecular material with itself.