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Adam's Curse

Bryan Sykes

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"I read it because I had read The Seven Daughters of Eve, and this is the other side of the picture. You can use the Y chromosome if you can find it to trace back through the family tree back to the Y chromosome Adam. It turns out that the Y chromosome Adam goes back to only about 59,000 years, and that has to do with the fact that the sperm that a man carries in his scrotum are removed from the body because they need to be kept at a cooler temperature. But that means they're exposed to cosmic rays and therefore subject to mutations, which are almost always harmful. Sykes believes that another thing that's happening is that the Y chromosomes themselves are deteriorating, that there are more and more of these 27 genes in the chromosomes that are being destroyed, so envisions a world in which - and he puts it at 125,000 years from now - there won't be any men left. I think that I would recommend it to anybody who has some knowledge of genetics. I think I would recommend it to anybody, provided they first read a book about basic genetics before they read it. I'll give it four stars because three is neutral and I think it's a much better than neutral book. I would take a star off because of two things: One is the way he carries this idea of purposeful action of genes and being selfish a little too far, and because I think he's not a very good prognosticator about what will actually happen. And that's reflected in the very title of the book, Adam's Curse."