| Y as a base of Knowledge. |
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| Think to yourself Times has been changed, Yes, man needs to look at himself and, ENJOY HIS LIFE, MAN SHOULD ONLY CONTROL THAT "WOMAN" DOES HER JOBS |
| Y "Jerome Burne" Guardian 3 But just as ruined buildings tell stories to archaeologists, so these ruined genes allow genetic archaeologists to spot, say, who are the black Jews of Africa. And just as decaying societies depend on immigrants to renew themselves, so it is the new arrivals on the Y that are emerging as the chromosome's most remarkable secret. The popular picture of DNA as a sort of blueprint fails to capture the dynamism of the whole genome. Although enormous care is taken to ensure that the genetic instructions are accurately copied, thousands of generations of this painstaking precision can be wrecked in an instant by a stray chunk of code crashing like an asteroid into a chromosome. The intruder is known as a jumping gene or transposon. While the vast majority of genes are stay-at-homes, never venturing from their native chromosome, jumping genes are the wanderers of the genome. After years in one place, they can suddenly uproot a stretch of code on either side of them, leap out of one chromosome and land at random in another. They may crash into the middle of a coding gene, causing havoc, or barge in beside one, subtly changing its function. Once again, it is Y's stereotypically masculine avoidance of housekeeping that makes the difference. While the new arrivals are often swept away on other chromosomes as they endlessly mix their genes, those that parachute into the badlands of the Y may survive for millions of years, like the craters of asteroids on the moon. Just occasionally, that allows them to do something remarkable. The markers on Y's genetic relics can trace people's roots, but the jumping immigrants may have made the Y a tiny starter button driving evolution. The first of the immigrants to be spotted on the Y was DAZ, detected by David Page. Until he started working on the Y, conventional wisdom was that it contained a gene called SRY, the master switch that turns on the boy-making machinery in the womb, but that was about it. Now we know that the Y contains about two dozen genes, compared with 2,000 or more on the X, and that it specialises in a way that is unique among the chromosomes. Most of its genes are involved in making sperm or helping cells do essential housekeeping tasks, such as building proteins. DAZ probably arrived on the Y somewhere between 20 and 40 million years ago, just about the time the early primates branched off from their cousins, possibly because of the boost DAZ gave them. It has been described as a "turbo-charged sperm producer" (the initials stand for "Deleted in Azoospermia") because men without it have no sperm or reduced sperm in their semen. For men whose sperm-producing genes are damaged, the results can be tragic. Around one in six couples have problems conceiving and for 20% of those, the key factor is a problem with the man's sperm. Modern IVF techniques have provided a solution: a single sperm can be extracted from the testes and injected directly into an egg for fertilisation in a test tube. But this solution comes with a curious penalty. Suddenly, for the first time, infertility becomes something that can be inherited. "Assisted reproduction can turn infertility into something that runs in families," Page says. "All males in such families will never be able to reproduce without help. The counselling issues are huge." While sperm production is the Y's major role, the latest and most audacious thinking about it comes from a couple of British researchers. Their controversial suggestion is that it was a jumping gene, arriving on the Y, that was a crucial factor in allowing humans to develop language. The boost to sperm production provided by DAZ may have allowed our primate ancestors to flourish, but something in our genes must also mark the point at which we split off from the ape line. What were the few fragments of protein that allowed us to inherit the Earth? The brute force way to find them is to churn through vast stretches of chimp and human genome, looking for differences. The more elegant solution is to imagine what such mutations might do and where they might be found, thengo in search of them, like the astronomers who predicted the existence of Pluto from perturbations in the movement of other planets. This is just what Dr Tim Crow, of the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford, has done. In a number of academic papers, he has proposed that there was a gene that emerged relatively late in human evolution, which changed the way the brain developed and so gave us the ability to produce language. What's more, he suggested that this gene takes a slightly different form in men and women. That may sound like an impossibly complex job for a single gene, but at a conference in London in 1999, another research group announced that they had found an actual gene that appeared to be a candidate for doing all those things and that it lived on the Y. "The gene we've found is expressed in the human brain but not in the ape's brain," says Dr Nabeel Affara of the Department of Pathology at Cambridge, "which means that it is a good candidate for a language gene." Apes have the X version (PCDHX), but at some point in human evolution it jumped into the Y. It's this travelling version that is missing in apes. Scientists are naturally cautious, but it may be possible to link the Y version (PCDHY) with two of the major turning points in human evolution. The date of the jump was probably around three million years ago - just when brain size was increasing and tools were starting to appear. Even allowing for the caveat that genetic dating is a far from precise science and that the date could be one million years either way, that's a remarkable tie-in. But there is more. In the unregulated territory of the Y, the travelling chunk of DNA carrying PCDHY was able to transform itself again, splitting in half and reversing its position. It is hard to say exactly when this happened but research is underway to ascertain whether it coincided with the period 120,000 to 200,000 years ago - a time when big changes in tool-making were going on and signs of symbolic ability began to emerge in Africa. Circumstantial evidence is all very well, but what does the gene actually do? At the moment, there are still more questions than answers, but nothing that has been found so far rules out the possibility that it is a gene involved in language. "It is one of a family of genes known as cadhedrins," Affara says. "These make proteins that go on the surface of nerve cells and are involved in signalling. PCDHX/Y genes are active in the foetus and are turned on only in certain regions of the brain." Once again, all features you would expect to find in a language gene. But there is a big mystery still lurking behind all these new discoveries on the Y. That's because the Y is a model of capitalist economics. Winners - genes that confer advantages - take all, because there is no mixing with any other chromosome. Losers, because they are most likely to affect fertility, almost instantly go to the wall. Which means the genes that do survive there must be doing something valuable. "The Y is essentially about sex," Affara says, "and it has lost most of its genes over evolution. So the big question is: why are those that have been retained still thriving? They must be doing something subtle that we don't understand yet." The implication is that the differences genetic archaeologists are picking up in men around the globe today could point to differences in abilities. "The different markers that allow us to distinguish between lineages may also point to functional differences," Affara says. It is an idea that clearly has the potential to become a political minefield, but it might be the Y's biggest surprise of all. The genome: a glossary Chromosomes The genetic material (DNA) in each one of our cells is arranged into 46 chromosomes, which form 23 pairs. Autosomes The 22 pairs of chromosomes, numbered 1 to 22, which are essentially identical. We each inherit one of each pair from our mother and one from our father. Recombination This is the way sex helps to weed out harmful mutations. When sperm and egg cells are created, all autosomal pairs of chromosomes can swap genes or parts of genes, keeping the two chromosomes in working order. This removes harmful genes and creates useful variations. Also known as meiosis. Sex chromosomes The remaining unequal pair - X and Y. Each sperm carries either an X or a Y, all eggs carry an X. An egg fertilised by an X-carrying sperm will produce a woman, so all women have two X chromosomes. An egg fertilised by a Y-carrying sperm will become a male, so males are XY. During egg production, X chromosomes (above, left) can exchange genes, but during sperm production, the Y (above, right) exchanges almost nothing with the X. Nucleotides These are the letters of the DNA 'alphabet' - A (adenine), T (thymine), C (cytosine) and G (guanine). Base pairs The 'words' of DNA. Each is made up of combinations of the four nucleotides. |
| "And looking around upon the middle classes, which form the staple stock of the community, it appears to me that the CHIEF canker at the root of women's lives is the want of something to do." |
| We respond to their acts with the same language which they do. |
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| To All FemiNaZi; Is it what you are looking for? |
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| Attention: Women Workers. |
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