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Y: The Descent of Men | 
 enlarge | Author: Steve Jones
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 676553
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Revised
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1
ISBN: 0618139303
Dewey Decimal Number: 599.938
UPC: 046442139304
EAN: 9780618139309
ASIN: 0618139303
Publication Date: May 15, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Men's beards grow faster when their bearers expect some sex. Fewer sperm cells are made in summer. Circumcised boys are more frightened of injections than boys who have not undergone the operation. And the average length of a man's penis is less than six inches, while that of a blue whale is ten feet.
These are only a few of the remarkable facts that spill out in Y: The Descent of Men. With marvelous literary flair, the acclaimed scientist and author Steve Jones offers a landmark exploration of maleness, based on today's explosion of biological research about what makes a male -- a topic of consuming interest to at least half the population. From what males consider to be the "prince of chromosomes" -- the Y -- to novel insights into men's hormones, hair loss, and the hydraulics of man's most intimate organ, Jones lays out the case for and against masculinity.
But the self-proclaimed "biologist in the bedroom" goes far beyond discussing straight science. He writes, for instance, of a meeting between Napoleon and Czar Alexander in which they discussed baldness cures rather than matters of state. And, as many angry males have found out, to the law fatherhood means more than genes. A father who is not a biological parent but who leaves a family with children still has responsibility for the offspring.
Steve Jones hints at a startling truth: men are the second sex. The Y chromosome is no longer an excuse for excess. Compared with their partners, men are in relative decline, whether in social status or in length of life. Both halves of the population have to learn to cope with the Y chromosome. This book helps show them how.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 MUCH BETTER THAN THE OTHER REVIEWS REPORT. August 18, 2008
James B. Johnson (HUDSON, FL United States)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Beards and baldness and belching are Nature's ways of saying "Youre manly." The Y chromosome has only 20 genes on it, but theyre important genes that code for things like fornicating, flirting, fighting, feeding, football, farting, etc. Everything a real guy needs in life, in a small wallet-size package.
Y:The Descent of Man is a general survey of facts, lore, and mythology about males. Jones segregates the information into distinct chapters about topics like baldness, erections, length, fidelity, aggression, development, etc. I learned a lot.
The book is well-written, and easy to read and digest.
I suspect the other reviewers are girls or girly-men.
 Sensationalism at its worst August 31, 2005
Andrew Ph.D (New Zealand)
14 out of 25 found this review helpful
This book would have been convincing if it had relied on hard facts
and better research of human evolution. However like many before him Mr. Jones deviates from rational argument and shows his prejudice in this work which relies solely on a sometimes poorly interpreted meaning of what we have learnt about the human DNA.
One area in which Jones argument displays a clear lack of knowledge ( for a suppposed scientific writer of repute). Is in his paragraph about the reproductive system of men vs women. Here Jones states that men have an inefficient system due to the millions of sperm men produce vs the comparatively small amount of offspring that is resulted. What Mr Jones doesn"t realise is that not all sperm are designed to impregnate, as research has proven that the majority of sperm are in fact soldier sperm designed to seek out a rival males sperm present in a woman and prevent it from fertilizing her egg, much like a game of american football. Thus is the competeive nature of humans (by nature the strongest do indeed survive).
There is nothing inefficient about this ...in fact men continue to produce large amounts of sperm well into their 70s and onwards and can continue a very healthy reproductive life well into a very ripe old age. Women in comparison have a very limited (finite)supply of eggs and their reproductive usefulness is relatively speaking short lived.
Jones also goes on about how the Y chromosome is smaller and full of foreign material, plagued by impurities compared to the X chromosome.This may be true
due to a single chromosome not being able to recombine, however, maleness as its been termed in the Y chromosome isnt solely determined by the Y chromosome. X and Y = male, therefore the X chromosome is also part male( being the primary chromosome shared in all humans) and the Y merely acts as a powerful switch to activate what is carried and useful solely for the male species. The Y chromosome has reduced in size the author claims due to its degeneration. Well this may be partly true, however the Y chromosome has become efficient because it doesn't need to carry or duplicate the genetic information already present in the X thus it carries only that which is needed to activate maleness from the X this can account for the size reduction.
If two xx chromosomes are present and even a hint of Y is imprinted on an X then the result will be a male. It is a small and sometimes slightly more vulnrable chromosome in some ways but it is a dominant gene in that when presnt the result will always be male no matter how many X chromosomes there are. Thus thius is scientifiuc proof on how powerful the Y chromosome really is.
We also know from research that the X chromosome has just as many impurities and in fact the better portion of X chromosome data that was gathered and could be used to effectively decode it came from men, can we generalise and claim that the X chromosomes that are passed onto men are of better quality?
The only great thing about the X is not the X chromosome itself but in the fact that since 2 Xs are present in a female it can recombine and negate the defective gene thereby reducing the odds of flaws being passed on to female offspring, but it's far from perfect.
We do know that in the beginning of the DNA decoding project that the many samples of Y chromosomes were taken from a poor selection of male candidates, in fact to complete the sequence very good samples were supplied from Mediteranean and asian countries, what hasnt been explained is why the male DNA of mediterranean and in some cases asia are of better quality than the Y chromosomes from Britain or some parts of the U.S.A?
Could this be a sign that men in The USA and Britain have suffered far more DNA damage? and is this due to drugs and environmental pollutants?
My point being that the book is full of generalisations and suppositions resulting in the authors conclusions that really when examined fall very short of being conclusively convincing.
Are we still in an age where one sex must be superior? We know the sexes are equal(on the whole) but in different ways each has an advantage over the other. To state that one is the first sex and the other the second is a pretty backward form of thinking. And scientific research has no definite verdict on this, even today although we can hear all kinds of argument.
Men and women Xy or XX chromosomed peoples have equal imperfections -that is the only fact gathered from DNA research.
Both have very clear strengths and weaknesses...
Unfortunately this book doesn't stick to fact, and refuses to balance the argument.
At one point Mr. Jones makes reference to mens genital size and supports his argument by stating that it is reported from a Japanese brothel that the average size is around 5.5 inches?
I live in japan and I've never heard of a brothel here measure or keeping stas on anyone, Japanese are very discreet, also how accurate can a brothel in japan be? Is this a method of good science? Actually on Japanese TV they claimed that the average size here was a mere 5 inches, thats way smaller than that of people of European or African descent. But what's Jones point anyway apart from trying to cash in on a bit of man bashing?
This book is a disappointing read overall, it's too general, makes some very wild assumptions and really leaves out so much data that shows that the Y chromosome is in fact quite an efficient and important chromosome in the evolution of mankind.Men share both X and Y drawing on two forms of chromosomes , women only have a pair of the same chromosome. Draw your own conclusions as to what that means, but it's definitely no handicap.In fact in many ways there are clear advantages of the male Y chromosome over the X which the Author refuses to even acknowledge or explore in this publication.
 Relies too much on supposition like it's fact June 20, 2005
Bill C. (Nevada)
4 out of 14 found this review helpful
He claims stone tools show our teeth became less apelike before we made tools. Jones, we have proven nothing about early man other than he is related to apes and monkeys (through DNA study we did this).
 An odd mixture of the interesting and the tedious May 2, 2005
A. J. CORNISH-BOWDEN (Marseilles, France)
8 out of 11 found this review helpful
With its deliberate echo of the title of Charles Darwin's book The Descent of Man (in which "man" means humanity), Y: the Descent of Men is a study of the biology of men (as opposed to women) and maleness. Y is the Y chromosome, which contains the very small proportion of genetic information that men have and women do not. There is much interesting information, but the lack of structure -- a long series of facts stated one after another with very little to link them together -- makes it difficult to read more than a few pages at a time. Likewise the nudging and doubles entendres rapidly become tedious: for example, when we are told that "man's most basic attribute also has a strong tendency to wilt" we are clearly expected to think of erectile dysfunction, though the context tells us that the sentence refers to the tendency of the Y chromosome to lose genes progressively in the course of evolutionary time.
In the Preface Steve Jones tells that he does not plan to compete with other people with the same name -- the lead guitarist of the Sex Pistols, for example, or the champion golfer, etc. -- but will stick to what he knows, the biology and evolution of males. In genetics his expertise cannot be questioned, but there is more to biology than genetics, and the biochemistry in the book is journalistic in style, with starry-eyed references to "special enzymes" that make oestrogen, nitric oxide, and so on, or "special sequences" of DNA that with affinity for particular proteins. The objection here is to the word "special", which adds nothing because the great majority of enzymes are highly specific (the exceptions are mostly involved in digestion and detoxification, and even these are much more specific than the sort of catalysts used by chemists), and many sequences of DNA are likewise specific: in a world where everyone is exceptional, no one is exceptional.
The editing is often careless, as for example in the passage where we are told (apparently) that Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, forbade athletes' wives from watching the events, with violations punished by being thrown over a cliff. This is clearly not what Jones meant to say, but only because we know that it is absurd can we deduce what he did mean to say. Or what are we to make of the following pair of sentences: "The lowest [sperm] counts were in Copenhagen, followed in turn by Paris, Edinburgh and Turku (which came a clear top). The citizens of Edinburgh should be proud of their cells' ability to swim, which takes the European gold medal"? Does the author think that Turku is not in Europe? (No, as he told us at the beginning of the paragraph that it was a European city). Is he making a distinction between sperm count and swimming ability? (Hard to believe, as this is the first mention of swimming ability in this context). Why would it be a matter of pride, anyway?
More seriously, the whole book encourages a confusion between maleness and possession of a Y chromosome, even though the author is perfectly well aware (and explains in the first chapter) that the system for sex determination used by most mammals is only one of several that exist in nature. The Y chromosome is slowly losing genes, and may conceivably retain none at all after some more millions of years of evolution, but so what? There is no necessary implication that the male sex will disappear and that humans will adopt parthenogenesis.
 The human male; Is he really privileged? August 17, 2004
M. Otte (Offenburg, Germany)
2 out of 11 found this review helpful
This is definately an interesting, witty and informative book, if your interested on why half of this worlds population is male and not a quarter or less, considering our potency.
Biologically only a fraction of us are actually necessary to keep mankind going- so why are we that many then?
It covers all spectrums of male live including medically unnecessary circumcisions, quite interesting, as the Western world looks upon female genital mutilation with discontent, but tolerates it on their males, often not even old enough to decide for themselves.
The first chapter can be quiet a turn off, as it tends to be very scientific, but if you get past that, you will have a hard time putting this book down.
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