Y: The Descent of Men by Steve Jones. Little, Brown, £14.99, pp 256. ISBN 0 316 856150. Rating: ★★
Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, has achieved minor cult status in the world of popular science. His reputation as an amusing and fluent TV boffin led me to expect Y: The Descent of Men to be a ripping good yarn. I was disappointed, because it turned out to be an incongruous mixture of pop science, serious science, and tabloid trivia.
It is a 260 page, brightly illuminated cornucopian essay on men, biology, penises, genetics, masculinity, and many other related topics. It gallops across the vast subject area, spewing out facts, insights, questions, and opinions at a phenomenal rate. Some of the facts would be more at home in Ripley's Believe it or Not. Did you know that Stanislawa Walasiewicz, who won gold for Poland in the 1932 Olympics as a woman sprinter, was discovered to have internal testes at postmortem examination 50 years later? Neither did I, and now that I do I'm not sure I care much.
Jones thinks the future may be gloomy for those of us who have Y chromosomes, man's defining feature. The tiny Y (size does matter, it seems), which only manages to carry 2% of the total genome, is “a microscopic metaphor of those who bear it, for it is the most decayed, redundant and parasitic of the lot.” This is strong language, which would probably cause a feminist roar if it were applied to the mighty X chromosome. The anti-male theme runs through Y, and in trying to describe its author I searched the dictionary for the male equivalent of the word “misogynist.” As far as I can discover, there is no such word in the English language. (A misanthrope is more of a humanity hater than a man hater.) Perhaps now is the time to invent such a word, because Steve Jones gives us the feeling that politically correct men should be thinking mostly negative thoughts about themselves.
Of course, writing about how pathetic men are may turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If men feel bad enough about themselves, their “hydraulics” (as Jones calls the erectile mechanism) may stop working altogether. Then we will all have to rely on sildenafil citrate (Viagra) or tadalafil (Cialis), and women may decide that cloning or some other method of reproduction has more to offer than one that depends on a chemically induced surge of nitric oxide.
Whatever the future of the Y chromosome and those who bear it, I take comfort in the fact that biology and evolution move incredibly slowly, and in mysterious ways. I'm prepared to put my money on Y chromosomes lasting for a few more millennia. If they then decide to shrivel up and disappear altogether, it will probably be because they've been replaced by something bigger, stronger and, who knows, more masculine.