It’s not the most uplifting news to start your morning with, hearing about potential issues with the future of the Y chromosome. However, this isn’t an immediate concern for us, but rather something that could affect future generations, possibly leading to ‘testicle mutations’ that might render Y chromosomes non-functional.
As you probably know, our biological sex is determined by the presence of X and Y chromosomes—individuals assigned male at birth typically have both, while those assigned female have two X chromosomes. Recent research indicates that the Y chromosome is shrinking, which could eventually have significant consequences. Perhaps Beyoncé was onto something when she sang ‘Run the World (Girls)’ back in 2011.
Professor Jennifer Graves from the Australian National University has theorized that in five million years, there will no longer be men on Earth—or anywhere else for that matter. Her prediction is based on the current rate of gene loss from the Y chromosome.
If Graves’ theory isn’t unsettling enough, genetics professor Brian Sykes published a book in 2003 titled “Adam’s Curse: A Future without Men,” suggesting that men could become extinct in just 100,000 years due to faster rates of genetic decline.
Not everyone agrees with these bleak predictions.
Jennifer Hughes, along with her team at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has questioned these assertions. In 2005, they compared human Y chromosomes to those of chimpanzees, our evolutionary relatives from about six million years ago.
Hughes and her colleagues extended this comparison to rhesus monkeys, whose evolutionary line diverged from ours 25 million years ago.
“The Y is not going anywhere and gene loss has probably come to a halt,” Hughes informed BBC News.
“We can’t rule out the possibility it could happen another time, but the genes which are left on the Y are here to stay. They apparently serve some critical function which we don’t know much about yet, but the genes are being preserved pretty well by natural selection.”
Her conclusion, derived from these comparative studies, suggests that the decline has been minimal. The Y chromosome has not lost any additional genes in the last six million years and has only shed one gene in the past 25 million years.
So, what do you think? Are men here to stay?