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Steve Jones is professor of genetics and head of the prestigious Galton Laboratory, University College of London. Jones has previously written three trade books, with two published in the U.S.: DARWIN'S GHOST and THE LANGUAGE OF GENES. A geneticist whose specialty is snails (he did some of the most important early sex-differentiation work by studying their shells), Jones has regularly appeared as one of the top authors on THE TIMES's bestseller lists. His witty and often humorous writing compares with - and in some cases, surpasses - that of Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward O. Wilson, Jared Diamond, and Steven Pinker. His books have received outstanding reviews in the United States as well as Britain.

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Y

Mariner Books

Excerpt

1
Nature"s Sole Mistake
Ejaculate, if you are so minded and equipped, into a glass of chilled Perrier.
There you will see a formless object, but look hard enough — or at least so
eighteenth-century biologists believed — and a baby appears: the male"s
gift to the female, whose only job is to incubate the child produced with so
much labor by her mate. So central seemed a husband"s role that his wife
was a mere seedbed, a step below him in society, in the household, and,
most of all, in herself.
Foolish of course and quite wrong, for biology proves that man,
and not woman, is the second sex. His sole task is to fecundate his
spouse, but quite why he does it remains a mystery. To divide is more
efficient than to unite, and everyone has a history of a single sexual event
when sperm met egg, followed by billions of cell divisions without its benefit.
Untold numbers of species manage without even that masculine moment and
for most of the time do not seem to mourn its absence.
Why men and why so many? Surely a few or even one would do,
yet males are everywhere and do not always behave well. As Lady Psyche
in Gilbert and Sullivan"s operetta Princess Ida sings, "Man is coarse and Man
is plain — /Man is more or less insane — /Man"s a ribald, Man"s a rake —
/Man is Nature"s sole mistake!" Much of modern biology is an affirmation of
her claims.
Man"s state can be defined in several ways, but most are
frivolous. Those who claim it are indeed plain, and coarse, and possessed
of a penis. None of those qualities is very significant, given the bizarre
appearance of half the members of many species and the many ways
invented by evolution to deliver their sex cells. Men themselves have a
special structure that shunts them toward their fate. As well as the twenty-
two chromosomes shared by each sex, women have two large X
chromosomes, while their partners have a single X chromosome paired with
a smaller Y. Fundamental as it might seem, the Y is not the root of
maleness, as other creatures gain the state without chromosomes at all.
Even ribaldry and rakishness are not peculiar to one partner, for plenty of
animals leave the husband to hold the baby while a wife searches for a new
mate.
To biologists, masculinity turns only on the size of the sex cells.
Such things come in large and small varieties, and the males make the
small ones. They put their bets on an outsider: on a single winner among
billions at the post, each stripped down ready to face a risky gallop to the
line. Their partners, in contrast, stake their all on a few more or less safe
bets. Every egg has a fair chance of a plod around the sexual racecourse,
but each carries, as a massive weight penalty, the goods needed to make an
embryo. Those who make sperm take a free ride at the expense of their
opposite numbers, for men do not — by definition — give birth. Instead, they
use female flesh to copy their own DNA.
Males act in their own interests but as an incidental perform a
vital role in evolution, for they act as conduits through which genes move
between females. Without their help, all new mutations would be confined to
the direct descendants of the individual in which they arise and life would at
once become a multitude of clones rather than a set of unstable biological
alliances formed anew each time sperm meets egg.
Men bring women together. They make links between families and
allow genes to be tested against nature in new and perhaps fruitful
coalitions. Expensive as they are, once evolved such creatures are almost
impossible to get rid of. A certain group of tiny freshwater animals managed
to do away with males a hundred million years ago, but for all others a burst
of masculinity is needed now and again.
Its humble task flies in the face of tradition, which has long seen
man as the bearer of the human heritage and his mate as, at best, a
tiresome detail. At Karnak, in Upper Egypt, the god Amun gave life to the
world by masturbating over it. In a more decorous myth, Genesis allows
Eve a mention, but by chapter five she too has gone: "And Adam lived an
hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his
image; and called his name Seth." After her moment of glory in the first book
of the Bible (one of the few written before the emergence of an all-male
priesthood), her sex fades away.
Eve"s consort could not, of course, reproduce without help, as he
was (ribs apart) a blind alley. What makes Adam and his descendants what
they are?
Physics was transformed in 1905 with the theory of relativity.
Everyone knows who thought of that idea, but Nettie Maria Stevens, the
Albert Einstein of manhood, is forgotten. Like Einstein, she started outside
science and turned late to research. In the year of relativity, when sex
chromosomes seemed no more central to masculinity than a mustache,
Miss Stevens explained how they work. Flour beetle sperm came, she
found, in two types, one with a large version of a certain chromosome, and
the other with a small, the famous Y. The truth about maleness was revealed.
Two centuries earlier, the secretary of the Royal Society had
recorded a remarkable case: "A country Labourer, living not far from Euston-
Hall in Suffolk shewed a Boy (his Son) about fourteen Years of Age, having
a cuticular Distemper. His mother had received no fright . . . his Skin was
clear at birth — by degrees it turned black, and in a little time afterwards
thickened, and grew into that State it appeared at present." The boy,
Edward Lambert, exhibited himself in London: "To be seen at the George in
Fenchurch Street a Man and his Son, that are cover"d from Head to Foot
with solid Quills, except their Face, the Palms of their Hands, and Bottoms
of their Feet." He had many children and grandchildren. They, too, were
exhibitionists, although some found it necessary to decorate their story:
"The young man is . . . covered with Scales . . . nearly half an inch long, and
so hard and firm that with the touch of a finger they make a sound like stones
striking together . . . the great-grandfather of the singular family to which
this young man belongs, was found savage in the woods of North America."
The Lamberts are much quoted as an example of a condition that
passes from fathers to sons. Even Darwin mentions them. Sadly, the
records reveal scaly daughters, too, as proof that their state was not in fact
coded for on the Y chromosome.
Several genes have professed that noble home, but not for almost
a century after its discovery did one earn it. Some of the false claims arise
because, in small families, a trait may appear by chance in sons alone.
Others are due to mere bias, as a history of maleness has, for men, a great
allure. In a certain Indian lineage, all the men — but none of the women —
have points of hair (sometimes waxed by their proud bearers) on their ears.
I once met a hairy-eared African who, when I asked whether any of his
relatives shared it, told me his mother did. Most other supposed cases of
Y-based...