Bad news for feminists: men won’t die out anytime soon
Some time ago feminists rejoiced in the impending destruction of the male race (see e.g. this article). However, recent research seems to indicate those pesky males will be around a lot longer than expected.
Comparing chimp and human DNA, scientists at Howard Hughes Medical Institute have found that the human Y-chromosome has found a way to stabilize itself since the two species split, about 6 million years ago. This isn’t intuitive, since the Y-chromosome, unlike other chromosomes, cannot repair itself by swapping genes with it’s maternal counterpart.
Instead, natural selection has somehow preserved the functional integrity of the human Y-chromosome. A mechanism for this could be the existence of many palindromes in the Y-chromosome, sequences that read the same backward as forward, thereby providing a backup for the genes residing in these regions. One could say that the Y-chromosome has sex with itself. More bad news for the feminists…