Y: The Descent of Men (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Ejaculate, if you are so minded and equipped, into a glass of chilled Perrier..." (more)
Key Phrases: male chromosomes, United States, The Descent of Man, New World (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Shriveled, decrepit and of little use except for sex, the Y chromosome is an apt metaphor for post-modern manhood in this eye-opening exploration of the biology of maleness. Jones, a geneticist and author of Darwin's Ghost, traces the development of maleness from its origins as a parasitic stratagem by which certain microbes forced others to replicate their genes for them, to the dawning age of cloning, which could, in theory, allow women to dispense with men's reproductive services altogether. Along the way he investigates the essentials of maleness, including baldness, the perverse, multi-faceted and never-ending competition for the favor of choosy females, and the many surgical, chemical and mechanical reinforcements men call on to stand firm in battle. Writing in a snappy, erudite style replete with droll euphemisms, Jones takes readers on an engaging tour of the Darwinian view of sex as the ultimately absurd outcome of natural selection and clashing reproductive strategies. But he is no essentialist defender of patriarchy. Indeed, in his treatment males emerge as the weaker sex-a complex and fragile variation on the sturdy female model, whose extra testosterone makes them shorter-lived, more prone to disease and suicide, less able than females to cope in contemporary society and doomed to descent in the coming "age of women." Men may find this book demoralizing, and Jones's case overstated, but women may take a certain grim satisfaction from it-and readers of both sexes will find it very educational.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

British science writer Jones declares that it's men, not women, who are the weaker sex. Even within their embryonic development, much can go awry. If they manage to emerge from gestation anatomically correct, boys must hope they don't carry one of the many genetic diseases that congregate on the Y chromosome. Men's grievances against evolution don't stop there, but Jones expounds on bad news in paradoxically jaunty fashion. This style allows him to elucidate the complexities of genetics in readable, clarifying prose and confirms that Jones is as fine an expositor here as he was in his previous book on evolution, Darwin's Ghost (2000). Jones' sardonic wit enlivens the molecular foundations of maleness, explaining hormones, baldness, sperm count, and even lineages of bastardy in language that is both educational and entertaining. Great general-interest science material. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Revised edition (May 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618139303
• ISBN-13: 978-0618139309
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,092,505 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Down for the count?, July 2, 2003

By	Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

An episode in Star Trek - The Next Generation portrays the Enterprise crew encountering a planet populated entirely by androgynes. The cast representing these creatures is clearly composed of only women. As clones, their appearance and outlook is nearly uniform and gender becomes a social ill. If Steve Jones is correct, this condition is the future of the human species. In this book Jones gives a full account of the rise and descent of masculinity, from the formation of the Y [male] chromosome to the current decline in sperm count in human society. As Jones makes clear, we all start in the womb as neuters, but various processes dictated by the father's chromosomes, turn some of us into males.

Jones opens his account with a touch of irony - it was a woman, Nettie Stevens, who identified the male chromosome in 1905. It took nearly a century to perceive the gene controlling sex determination - the SRY [sex recognition gene]. From there Jones explains the role of that short, 20 gene DNA string and its impact. Embryo development relies on sperm-borne chemicals. This input is part of the reason maleness drives the pace of evolution. Sperm is an invader, and the body resists invaders. The chemical changes reflect that fundamental dichotomy and there's nothing universal about male sperm. Its variety reflects the rapid evolutionary pathways taken by various organisms. And few species have evolved as rapidly as humans, Jones reminds us.

That haste, however, has led to vulnerability. Male lines, particularly in our own species, die out quicker. Jones' example is expressed in the recognition that all the family lineages since William the Conquerer had died out. Nor are his examples confined to humans. Hermaphroditic slugs in the French Pyranees are exhibiting an increase in female-only lines. Given his evidence for this happening in modern men, one can only wonder at the cause of this unisex phenomenon.

For it's modern men that are the target of this book. Whatever forces in evolution have reduced the size and impact of the Y chromosome, modern civilization has exacerbated its decline. Clinics in various nations record reduced sperm counts, notably in Italian taxi drivers, American businessmen, Scots shopkeepers. Jones isn't applauding these trends as some proto-feminist. He wants, through this book, for males to become aware of the fate their descendents will confront. Maleness is likely to disappear, and offers pointers to prevent that extinction. More focus, he stresses, needs to be made on the impact of various foodstuffs and industrial chemicals.

Depressing as much of this sounds, there is much to be learned from this book. Jones' ability to impart good science in a readable style makes this book an ideal acquisition. While facts galore are presented here, pedantic stumbling blocks are not. He has no more axe to grind than the desire to increase our awareness of ourselves, both male and female. As he notes, understanding of the operations of sexual mechanisms is still in its infancy. This book will stand for some time until more of our body's hidden secrets are revealed. For we men, let us hope it's not too late. The recent announcement of the mapping of the Y chromosome renders Jones' forecast obsolete, but most of his data remains valid. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but not cohesive, July 30, 2003

By	Daniel R. Cassino (Princeton, NJ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Jones has an interesting approach - contrasting the weakness of the y chromosome with the outward behavior of men, but the book basically boils down to a series of anecodotes. They're all interesting, but it isn't cohesive enough to rank among the best popular science writing.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An odd mixture of the interesting and the tedious, May 2, 2005

By	A. J. Cornish Bowden (Marseilles, France) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

With its deliberate echo of the title of Charles Darwin's book The Descent of Man (in which "man" means humanity), Y: the Descent of Men is a study of the biology of men (as opposed to women) and maleness. Y is the Y chromosome, which contains the very small proportion of genetic information that men have and women do not. There is much interesting information, but the lack of structure -- a long series of facts stated one after another with very little to link them together -- makes it difficult to read more than a few pages at a time. Likewise the nudging and doubles entendres rapidly become tedious: for example, when we are told that "man's most basic attribute also has a strong tendency to wilt" we are clearly expected to think of erectile dysfunction, though the context tells us that the sentence refers to the tendency of the Y chromosome to lose genes progressively in the course of evolutionary time.

In the Preface Steve Jones tells that he does not plan to compete with other people with the same name -- the lead guitarist of the Sex Pistols, for example, or the champion golfer, etc. -- but will stick to what he knows, the biology and evolution of males. In genetics his expertise cannot be questioned, but there is more to biology than genetics, and the biochemistry in the book is journalistic in style, with starry-eyed references to "special enzymes" that make oestrogen, nitric oxide, and so on, or "special sequences" of DNA that with affinity for particular proteins. The objection here is to the word "special", which adds nothing because the great majority of enzymes are highly specific (the exceptions are mostly involved in digestion and detoxification, and even these are much more specific than the sort of catalysts used by chemists), and many sequences of DNA are likewise specific: in a world where everyone is exceptional, no one is exceptional.

The editing is often careless, as for example in the passage where we are told (apparently) that Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, forbade athletes' wives from watching the events, with violations punished by being thrown over a cliff. This is clearly not what Jones meant to say, but only because we know that it is absurd can we deduce what he did mean to say. Or what are we to make of the following pair of sentences: "The lowest [sperm] counts were in Copenhagen, followed in turn by Paris, Edinburgh and Turku (which came a clear top). The citizens of Edinburgh should be proud of their cells' ability to swim, which takes the European gold medal"? Does the author think that Turku is not in Europe? (No, as he told us at the beginning of the paragraph that it was a European city). Is he making a distinction between sperm count and swimming ability? (Hard to believe, as this is the first mention of swimming ability in this context). Why would it be a matter of pride, anyway?

More seriously, the whole book encourages a confusion between maleness and possession of a Y chromosome, even though the author is perfectly well aware (and explains in the first chapter) that the system for sex determination used by most mammals is only one of several that exist in nature. The Y chromosome is slowly losing genes, and may conceivably retain none at all after some more millions of years of evolution, but so what? There is no necessary implication that the male sex will disappear and that humans will adopt parthenogenesis.