Barrel Strength

Amid the terrible news of earthquake in Haiti and the world-historical confrontation between Google and China over the unity of the Internet, comes this news: the male Y chrmosome keeps reinventing itself.

The Whitehead Institute, in Cambridge, across the river from Boston, published this today in Nature
The study compared the Y chromosomes in chimpanzees and man, to discover that the rate of change in humans was phenomenal.

Quoting from Nature:

“As the earlier studies had suggested, many of the stark changes between the chimp and human Y chromosomes are due to gene loss in the chimp and gene gain in the human. Page’s team found that the chimp Y chromosome has only two-thirds as many distinct genes or gene families as the human Y chromosome and only 47% as many protein-coding elements as humans. The remainder of the chimp and human genomes are thought to differ in gene number by less than 1%.

“Even more striking than the gene loss is the rearrangement of large portions of the chromosome. More than 30% of the chimp Y chromosome lacks an alignable counterpart on the human Y chromosome, and vice versa, whereas this is true for less than 2% of the remainder of the genome.”

All this reinforces how different we are from chmps as a species, but how much more different we are becoming over time. It also reverses the previous notion that the Y chromosome was residual or of declining importance. As we male chauvinists expect, it is the source of most of the change in the human species. Take that, Andrea Dworkin!

[Note: The genome sequencing comparison between men and women, and chimps of either sex, has yet to be conducted. So my headline is yet unproven.]

 Test: Which of the three items just mentioned: the disaster in Haiti, the unity of the Internet, or the rapid evolution of the Y chromosome, do you consider most important? Discuss.