‘The Selfish Gene’ and ‘Y: The Descent of Men’
I’ve just finished making my way through a pair of popular science biology books: Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and Steve Jones’ Y: The Descent of Men, both of which were pretty good.
Y: The Descent of Men
A book about the biological differences between the sexes (ie, what makes one individual male and the other female, in the absence of lipstick or an interest in ball game statistics) and the male sex chromosome, Y.
There was a lot of stuff that was quite interesting, in the way that the natural world tends to be - which animals have evolved the penis and which ones lost it again (seriously guys, you better watch out) and which animals have naturally bifurcated penises (keep your BME images to yourselves, thank you).
More interesting, though, was the lower level detail. The gradual but apparently inexorable decline of the Y chromosome itself: how it is more riddled with deleterious mutations and junk than any other section of the genome; the correspondingly smaller chance of any male foetus making it all the way to adulthood without something wrong with it. From colour blindness to autism the chance of these conditions popping up is considerably bigger if you’re male.
It doesn’t even to stop there. I know the old saying about poison being a matter of quantity but I never guessed how true it was of testosterone. If there’s one that comes out again and again in this book, it’s that this principal male sex hormone is what does for us in the end - from supressing the immune system to causing general stress, eventually curtailing the male life span by five to ten years.
It was pretty interesting but the prose style didn’t really gel, for me at least. It seemed a bit stream-of-consciousness, flitting from topic several times per chaper with no obvious theme at times.
The Selfish Gene
Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was a much more studious piece of work at times - a much longer work and smaller type too - which required a good deal more thought to fully comprehend the ramifications of the book.
That’s not to say it was necessarily difficult; Dawkins has a very easy style, at once educated but conversational. Thinking back there was very little explicit biology - at least not in terms of profligate use of terminology. But the ideas themselves were quite subtle and deep. Makes you almost feel clever at the end.
I hesitate to say what the book is about, since it’s a very complicated subject. But there appear to be many people who think they know what it’s about while being in contradiction with the author. So let me just say that the book has nothing to do with morality or the way individuals should behave. The ‘selfish’ of the title is merely another way of looking at orthodox Darwinian evolution. One can almost think of it as reapplication of the principles of “social Darwinism” back to the unconscious realm of genes and chromosomes. Each gene is metaphorically out to look after number one. But, of course, it is just a metaphor.
I was reading the revised 1989 edition (the original was published in 1976) which had extensive footnotes for each chapter. These were sometimes more interesting than the chapters themselves, since they represented the thoughts of the author thirteen years after the original publications - which predictions came true, which areas are now the subject of frantic research. Most important, I thought, were the passages which became an embarassment to the author: it takes a lot of guts to highlight, rather than bury, your own inadequacies.
I enjoyed The Selfish Gene more than Y: The Descent of Men but they have very different purposes. For a proper popular science book I’d recommend getting hold of the 30th anniversary edition of Dawkins’ book. If you want more of a sedate run through the history of (the biology of) maleness, go for Jones’ book.