The 23rd Chromosome!
Furqan Ali
XX and XY, to the common man these are nothing but two variables, but to anyone who has studied at least tenth standard biology, they represent one of greatest phenomenon of Mother Nature or in the words of the pious “God’s Masterpiece”, the opposite sex. After thousands of years of evolution, human kind is now one of nature’s greatest achievements and there is no doubt in the fact that human kind is on the top of the food chain. But if you take a closer look you’ll find that we are actually at civil war, a war popularly known as the ‘battle of the sexes’, with both genders trying desperately to get even higher up on the food chain. History tells of a time when there were female dominant societies and if we look at our cousins on the tree of evolution, we’ll find most, if not all apes have female dominant communities. Males might appear to have an upper hand at the moment but do we really? And is a dominant sex really necessary in today’s society.
There are twenty three pairs of chromosomes in the human cell, twenty two of which are identical in both males and females but it’s the twenty third pair that divides human kind into the male and female sexes. If you were to take a microscopic look at these chromosomes, you’d find that a female has to long chromosomes and a male has a long and a short one, the long chromosomes are given the alphabet ‘Y’ and the short one is given the alphabet ‘X’. These microscopic elements are what determine someone’s sex. As I said before a male has a one long ‘Y’ chromosome and one short ‘X’ chromosome, research has shown that the ‘X’ chromosome might be shrinking even more. Some say that there will come a time when the ‘X’ chromosome will completely disappear and with it, the male sex. Females will continue to exist and by the time natural selection deletes males, the female race might evolve new ways to reproduce, maybe some sort of asexual reproduction like pathogenesis. But one thing’s for sure, females are here to stay.
Most societies nowadays are male dominant, but it wasn’t always this way. The first clue about female dominant societies comes from God himself. If you take a look at most of ancient religions, you’d find that in almost all of them, a female occupies the central role. Take the Hellenes for example, the creation story in Greek myth starts with Gaea, a female goddess rising from the waters of chaos. Before the arrival of male dominance, the middle eastern people believed in a deity called ‘The Goddess’ and there are many others that have a female deity in centre. Homer in his epic of the Trojan War describes a nation of female warriors that came to Troy’s aid, The Amazons. The Amazon Nation was believed to be a highly female dominant society. So much so that men had a status that was far lower than a slave. Legend tells us that the right arm of a male would be mutilated beyond repair, so they couldn’t in any way rebel against their female masters. In fact males were only kept for breeding, if they weren’t needed for continuation of the human race; I doubt the male sex would exist right now. Reading such legends make me think, maybe it’s not such a good idea to empower the opposite sex.
The evolution theory presented by Charles Darwin is perhaps one of the greatest breakthroughs in biological sciences. He proposed that all living creatures descended from a common ancestor. In other words all living things are related to one another and if we were to be more specific, some organisms are more closely related to each other than others, like a mouse is closely related to a rabbit than pigeon. So according to the theory of evolution human kind belong to the family of Apes and if we were to study the society of our cousins on the evolutionary tree, we’d find that almost all of them have female dominant societies. In most cases, females of the society choose a male as the king but the king is more or less symbolical and can be easily replaced. We can learn a lot about early human civilization by studying our genealogical relatives. It’s highly probable that the early human societies resembled that of the Apes. It could’ve been a matriarchal society, where women would’ve been the Ultra-protected class and the voting class with men having limited rights.
But the past is the past and nowadays most of the known world has male dominant societies. Or so we think. If you take a closer look, women are the ones that are really dominant, think about it, man does all the hard labor and the women hardly has to lift to finger and just because there are males in the government don’t mean they don’t do women’s bidding, almost all countries have a 54% + women voter ratio. So according to basic rules of democracy and politics the leaders must do what’s best for the majority of the society, and the majority is the female specie. The Greek Billionaire Aristotle Onassis said “If women did not exist, all the money in the world would’ve no meaning”. What this means is that man does what he does not to dominate women but to please them. Most males willing give the fruits of their labor to women, whether it’s a mother or a wife. In the matriarchal Native American societies the punishment for man who raised his voice against a women was death much akin to the modern law in the U.K according to which a man can be arrested for raising his voice against a women but a women can even assault a man and she still won’t get adequate punishment. So women are the ultra-protected and voting class in the modern society, men don’t have similar rights and voila, The Female Dominant Society.
But I ask this from all of you, is a dominant sex really necessary in a society? If you ask me, I don’t think it is. Most human genesis stories say that human kind was created from clay and then the clay was cut into halves to create the opposite sexes. I think both sexes really complement each other; neither is complete without the other. So in theory a true human society should neither be dominated by males or females but both should have equal representation in every possible matter of life.
God Created Man and Woman equal. (Genesis 1:26-27). Jesus came down on the men’s behavior. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matthew5: 28).The Talmud tells the religious man, in effect: If you have a problem, you deal with it. It is the male gaze — the way men look at a woman — that needs to be desexualized, not women in public. The power to make sure men don’t see women as objects of sexual gratification lies within men’s — and only men’s — control. However, Monotheistic religions treat women as a mere appendage. The religious demand for modesty is also apparently a clandestine means to controlling women’s bodies.
It is generally believed that success in male–male competition genuinely reflects high quality and that female preference for dominant males should therefore be widespread. However, recent studies suggest that male dominance is not always attractive and that it does not necessarily predict superior parental quality, better genes or other forms of benefit to females. In fact, the costs of choosing a dominant male can sometimes outweigh the benefits. When traits selected by male–male competition do not reflect overall mate quality, females are expected to use other choice cues and might occasionally prefer subordinate males. Thus, male–male competition and female choice can sometimes work in different, or even opposing, directions.
The writer has made a good attempt to speak on a topic to which fewer people are familiar. However, their is no scientific evidence to support the idea that a shortened Y chromosome will lead to the extinction of male sex.
The chromosome is an intricate strand of genes containing DNA that posesses information and codes as to how to perform essential life functions. The Y chromosome that determines the male sex, used to contain 800 genes about 250 millions years, which now contains only 30. This theory rang alarm bells in male sex and many scientists devoted their research to find whether the male sex is really going to be extinct owing to a shortening of Y chromosome.
Hughes, a female scientist by the way, went to the extent of comparing the Y chromosome of Chimpanzees with that of men – chinpanzees were our cousins which split in lineage 25 milllion years ago. She discovered that Y chromosome of a chimpanzee and men remained almost identical in size despite the separation of 25 million years, leading to the conclusion that no shortening of Y chromosome in men has occured in the meanwhile and is likely to remain stable in the future. Initially, y chromosome went through a stunting phase until it achieved its optimum size – a shorter gun taking on the job of a canon. It is here to stay and males are not going into oblivion.
The major developments in human civlization took place during the last hundred thousand years, yet both sexes with men containing a stable Y chromosome went through several phases of dominance of either sex. This leads us to the conclusion that Y chromosome plays no role in dominance of either sex.
Dominance is more of social construct than a genetic one. The human civilization and particularly religions of any sorted invent the social constructs that defined the roles of sexes in the society. Any religion in its core is a powerful social magnet. Our genetic construction on the other side has fine tuned itself over the millions of years to attain the optimum level that we enjoy today. Any disbalance in this finely developed system will lead to annihilation of human specie, both men and women.
I read this article recently on NPR. You may find it interesting. “Why Men Die Younger Than Women: The ‘Guys Are Fragile’ Thesis”.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/06/17/192670490/why-men-die-younger-than-women-the-guys-are-fragile-thesis