Y - the Descent of Men by Steve Jones [color:"yellow"]and another XY-Book, for men walking the extinction Rift <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/evilgrin1.gif" alt="" /> - humbly presented by a laughing librarian - bye bye guys, science is against you <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/delight.gif" alt="" /> [/color]
Amazon.co.uk
In Y: The Descent of Men, the remarkable implications of an accident of biological evolution are brought to life by the award-winning science writer and British academic geneticist Steve Jones. Not to be confused with clothing sizes or brand names, the capital letters XX and XY refer to the approximate shapes of the sex determining chromosomes. Men have the smaller Y chromosome and confer gender differences on children through their sperm, a distinction that was only discovered in 1902. It was not so very long ago, as Jones reminds us, that scientists (male of course) thought that sperm carried a miniature human (homunculus) and a wife was "a mere seedbed; a step below (a husband) in society, in the household and, most of all, in herself".
Since Darwin's day, humans have been displaced from their place just below the angels in the grand scheme of life. And now to further our ignominy and descent, within the human genome,
the male Y chromosome is, as Jones puts it, "the most decayed, redundant and parasitic of the lot". <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/evilgrin1.gif" alt="" /> Furthermore, man himself may become redundant, for his sperm can be grown in animal testes, and in mice at least an egg can be fertilised with a body cell from another female.
Steve Jones is a brilliant science writer, capable of teasing, cajoling, entertaining and educating the reader without pain. Jones has not only pinched Darwin's title The Descent of Man but learned his technique of persuasion in which the potential critic is disarmed by having the faults, problems and dirt on the subject brought out into the open and given a good public washing. So with men and masculinity, as Jones details with telling detail and great humour, our biological inheritance and its social implications have left an immense wake of problems which will need to be sorted if men and humanity are to get over the crisis of modern manhood.
So come on now chaps, pull yourselves together, dump the techie toys and mags and check out why your organ is so dangerous and what to do about the problem. For a first step, give yourself a treat, read this book and allow yourselves to be entertained and informed, if not necessarily reassured. --Douglas Palmer.
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
Kurzbeschreibung
n objective study of maleness that, in the light of Dolly the Sheep - who was concieved without male assistance, discusses man's current postition of potential redundance in society. Taking a scientific stance Jones looks at the genetics and biology of what it means to be a male and how he differs from the rest of the species. --
Synopsis
Men, towards the end of the last millennium, felt a sudden tightening of the bowels with the news that the services of their sex had at last been dispensed with. Dolly the Sheep - conceived without male assistance - had arrived. Her birth reminded at least half the population of how precarious man's position may be. What is the point of being a man? For a brief and essential instant he is a donor of DNA; but outside that glorious moment his role is hard to understand. This book is about science not society; about maleness not manhood. The condition is, in the end, a matter of biology, whatever limits that science may have in explaining the human condition. Today's advances in medicine and in genetics mean at last we understand why men exist and why they are so frequent. We understand from hormones to hydraulics how man's machinery works, why he dies so young and how his brain differs from that of the rest of mankind.
