« Gil Gutknecht New DCCC #1 Target | Main | Dr. Tongue’s 3-D House of Bin Laden…In 3-D! »
Respect the Cock
By Jeff Fecke | October 19, 2006
William Tucker comes up with the dumbest argument in the history of argumentation:
Time magazine did one of those Evolution updates last week, “How We Became Human,” on its cover. There wasn’t too much new — just how little we differ genetically from chimpanzees.
Yet there was one sentence that stood out like a lightning bolt. It has enormous implications for understanding how human societies evolved and why they sometimes find it difficult to get along with each other. Here it is:
[T]he principle of gene-by-gene comparison [between species] remains a powerful one, and just a year ago geneticists got hold of a long-awaited tool for making those comparisons in bulk. Although the news was largely overshadowed by the impact of Hurricane Katrina…the publication of a rough draft of the chimp genome in the journal Nature immediately told scientists several important things. First they learned that overall, the sequences of base pairs that make up both species’ [i.e., humans and chimps] genomes differ by 1.23% — a ringing confirmation of the 1970 estimates — and that the most striking divergence between them occurs, intriguingly, in the Y chromosome, present only in males.
Did you see that? It deserves much more attention than Time was willing to give it. Basically, the point is that, in crossing the little evolutionary distance that exists between chimps and humans, most of the changes occurred in males. In other words, what differentiates us from our mammalian relatives is changes that have occurred in the male of the species.
Wow! And here I thought that the Y chromosome was basically a nubbin of genetic gobledygook that encodes for maleness, but essentially nothing else.
Oh, wait, that’s exactly what the Y chromosome is.
From there, the argument only gets worse. Essentially humanity is what we are because the Y chromosome made men into parents who told women no huggin’, no kissin’ untill I get a wedding vow. Because as we all know from watching sitcoms, men hate sex and women can’t get enough. Except the opposite. And if not for those brave men who didn’t want the nookie all the time, then we’d all just be like the bonobos, off having jungle orgies.
Why that’s a bad thing, Tucker declines to say.
I could go on, but why would I, when PZ Myers has done such a fabulous job?
It’s seductively easy to jump from the fact that the Y chromosome is only present in males to the conclusion that it is responsible for encoding all male attributes, including as Tucker does male monogamy and various features of behavior associated with masculinity. It isn’t true.
[...]
Hmmm. No monogamy gene. No sports fan gene. No hyperactive remote control button pressing gene. Why, there isn’t any simple correspondence between any gene and stereotypical behaviors anywhere—it’s as if behavior is an emergent property of the interactions of many genes throughout the genome and the environment, rather than a facile mapping of a complex phenotype to a short stretch of nucleotides.
For example, if monogamy is attributable to some array of different genes, those genes aren’t going to be on just the Y chromosome: they’re going to be scattered throughout the genome, including on chromosomes that we share with females. Genes like SRY on the Y chromosome may trigger epigenetic changes that modify the expression of genes located anywhere in the genome. It might blow poor Mr Tucker’s feeble mind to learn that the gene for the androgen receptor, a protein absolutely essential to the development of his masculinity, is located on the X chromosome—you know, that female thing.
[...]
What about the observation that “the most striking divergence between [humans and chimps] occurs, intriguingly, in the Y chromosome”? If the human Y chromosome has accumulated all these differences, they must be important changes in human evolution, right?
Nope. If Mr Tucker had actually read the Nature paper on the human-chimpanzee comparisons or an earlier work by Skaletsky et al., he would have discovered that they had an explanation, and it wasn’t the selective preservation of advantageous masculine mutations. The Y chromosome diverged between the two species entirely by chance.
There are 5-6-fold more cell divisions involved in the production of sperm than ova, which means that male germ cells have many more opportunities for replication errors—this increases the frequency of mutations in chromosomes from the male parent. In addition, recombination is mostly eliminated in the Y chromosome, and recombination is a process that allows deleterious alleles to be purged by shuffling ‘bad’ combinations away.
The actual reason human and chimpanzee chromosomes are more different than others is not quite as dignified or wonderful as Tucker thinks. It’s because the Y chromosomes accumulate more random garbage over time, and lack a mechanism to clean themselves up. I suppose one could argue that perhaps that does map onto some male properties, but they aren’t the ones Tucker dreams of as the source of human progress!
Go read the whole exquisite takedown. William Tucker, thanks to PZ Myers, you’ve been owned.
Topics: Feminism, Science, The Men's Rights Movement | 1 Comment »
October 3rd, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Hello, I don\’t know a lot about the subject matter in this particular post (), but I did enjoy reading this and learned a little bit. Before clicking here I was trying to find out about Sexual Behavior In The Human Female in particular, and I will come back now that I have found you.