【卫报】Y染色体被判缓刑让男人们找回自信教案分析.docx

Over millions of years of evolution the Y chromosome, the biological keeper of all things male, has withered and shrunk. Photograph: Mauro Speziale/Getty Images Nature deals some unkind blows, but none is more hurtful to the pride of man than the looming demise of the Y chromosome. When it comes to sex chromosomes, women are XX and men are XY. But the modern male chromosome is not what it used to be. Over millions of years of  HYPERLINK http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/evolution evolution, the biological keeper of all things male has withered and shrunk. So dramatic has the decline been, that one day the Y might vanish completely. This prospect is seriously debated among biologists. At a  HYPERLINK /pubmedgenetics conference in Manchester last year, half of those attending thought the Y chromosome was bound for oblivion. Humans would have to evolve a fresh way to balance the sexes. Hope may be at hand, though.  HYPERLINK /10.1038/nature10843 Writing in the latest issue of Nature, Jennifer Hughes and her colleagues at the  HYPERLINK / Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT come out in support of the Y chromosomes chances of survival. We can confidently say that the decay of the Y chromosome has come to a halt, and that would portend very well for its future, Hughes told the Guardian. There are far more things to worry about than this. The X and Y chromosomes. Graphic: Guardian The researchers studied the genes on the human Y chromosome and compared them with those on the Y chromosomes of chimpanzees and rhesus macaques. The latter split from the human lineage 25m years ago. Hughes found that only one gene had been lost from the human Y chromosome in the 25 million years since humans and old world monkeys took separate evolutionary paths. The rapid decline of the Y chromosome seems to have ground to a halt at least tens of millions of years ago. We are hoping this evidence will put the extinction of the Y to rest once and for