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New evidence has emerged to disprove theories that men are threatened with extinction
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Several researchers have previously published data showing that the Y chromosome, which is found only in males, is undergoing such rapid genetic degradation that it could disappear entirely within 5 million years.
In the middle of the 20th century, it was established that the Y chromosome plays a vital role in determining the sex of the embryo during embryonic development. It was also known that it contains a series of genes responsible for spermatogenesis processes. It was established that the Y chromosome contains only 78 genes (versus thousands contained in other chromosomes).
However, according to the results of a study published in the journal Nature, genetic degradation of the Y-type sex chromosome has virtually ceased. Predictions of a genetic catastrophe
Professor Bryan Sykes, author of the 2003 book "Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men," predicted the disappearance of men within 100,000 years.
Such predictions, made by many geneticists in the late 1990s, were based on comparisons of the human X and Y chromosomes. The female X chromosome has 800 genes, compared to just 78 on the male Y chromosome.
Jennifer Hughes and her colleagues at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, decided to test the validity of these claims about the imminent demise of the Y chromosome.
In a paper published in the journal Nature in 2005, they compared the human Y chromosome with the sex chromosome of chimpanzees, whose evolutionary line diverged from humans about 6 million years ago.
In the current study, they looked at the Y chromosome of rhesus monkeys, which are separated from humans by 25 million years of evolution.
The researchers concluded that over the past 6 million years, the degradation of the human Y chromosome has been minimal - it has not lost a single gene, and over a period of 25 million years, the number of genes has decreased by one.
"The Y chromosome is not going anywhere, and gene loss has virtually stopped," says Dr Hughes. "We can't rule out the possibility that this could happen in the future, but the genes that are on the Y chromosome will be with us."
"They appear to have some critical function that we can only guess about, but these genes are well preserved in the process of natural selection." Men are not at risk
The genetic degradation of the Y chromosome occurred due to the very limited exchange of genetic material between the male and female chromosomes during reproduction. And between the pair of female chromosomes of the X type, such an exchange occurs very actively. This means that mutations in the Y chromosome are preserved from one generation of men to the next.
"The X chromosome doesn't cause problems because it continually recombines with its mate, but the Y chromosome never recombines, which makes it vulnerable to all these degenerative factors," explains Dr Hughes.
Professor Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, believes that men's long-term future is safe.
"This paper convincingly shows that gene loss on the Y chromosome occurs relatively rapidly early in evolution, but then reaches a point at which selection forces the process to stop."