Book Review: Men may be irrelevent
Natural selection does not plan ahead. It’s a common misconception that the evolution of species happens with some sort of foresight and will. That at some point, for instance, man’s ancestors somehow collectively decided, “OK, folks, if we’re going to dominate the world, we’re going to need to enlarge our brains, walk upright and develop opposable thumbs. So let’s start mutating that DNA — we’ve only got a few hundred generations to get where we want to be.”
In reality, there is no plan, no direction and no architect guiding how successive generations evolve. Speciation just happens according to indifferent laws of nature.
Neither are our genes hunkering down in their nucleic bunkers, trying to come up with a plan to best ensure they get reproduced in their owner’s children’s DNA. Genes are tiny sequences of nucleotides: biochemicals with no consciousness or will. Recombination and fertilization, the processes through which babies are made, are chemical reactions, not contests of intelligence and strength.
Furthermore, the Y chromosome, the bit of genetic material that makes a male a male, does not itself have a stereotypically male personality. It isn’t lazy, or promiscuous, or poor at communicating its feelings.
Steve Jones knows all this, being a geneticist, and yet his new book, Y, will do nothing to disabuse people who imagine that genes possess human qualities such as selfishness, deceptiveness and a will to survive. The book, a comprehensive roundup of the biochemistry, sociology and trivia of maleness, uses the Y chromosome as one of many metaphors to draw parallels between molecular-level events and societal phenomena. Often, Jones seems to be trying to use these analogies to lighten the text’s scientific burden. But in so doing, he ends up treating hormones and proteins as little people. The reader must work all the harder to sift through laboured and often opaque analogies. Worse, the science itself is sometimes lost in the verbal shuffle.
“Androgen receptors, as they are known, are proteins a thousand or so amino acids long which stand ready to pass on the joyful news of an order from maleness headquarters to the genes poised to take advantage of it. They are part of a great family of biological ushers, each ready to welcome its chosen guest,” he writes. “The receptor has a segment that binds to the visitor and a hinge that allows it to change shape. Then it attaches itself and its emissary to special sequences of DNA close to the target gene. This switches the gene on and masculinity surges forward.” Anthropomorphic passages such as this twine through the entire book, demanding that readers unpeel the package to reveal the information lurking beneath.
Jones is strongest when dispensing factoids, and there is enough material in this book to carry a retentive reader through dozens of cocktail parties. He extends himself far beyond his field of study, quoting rates of infanticide in India and China, relative ejaculate quantities among males of the animal world, passages from the Kama Sutra and so on. He touches just about every male issue, from baldness to fidelity to transsexuality.
But there is a thread running through his statistics and tidbits: Maleness, he argues, is facing a crisis, a catastrophe hinted at in the subtitle. It’s a play on Charles Darwin’s second famous work, The Descent of Man. (Jones positions himself as the modern voice of the 19th-century naturalist. In his previous book, Darwin’s Ghost, Jones acts as Darwin’s ghost writer, updating The Origin of Species to incorporate 20th-century genetics.) This time around, Jones departs entirely from Darwin. The Descent of Man theorized about where mankind came from. Jones speculates about where men are headed.
Over the last century, he says, the male of the human species has been decreasing in power and importance, and he may already be irrelevant. Emasculating hormones in our drinking water; decreasing sperm counts; women’s increasing financial and political autonomy; cloning techniques that require only female genetic material: There’s less supply of — and less demand for — masculinity than ever before.
Y is neither a misogynist tract, nor a clarion call for men to reclaim their maleness. The book is designed to spark conversation, not revolution. In fact, Jones seems more amused by the decline of men than horrified by it. On the other hand, he might just be letting his androgen receptors do his worrying for him.