To say there's a new study in genetics is like pointing out that it is raining in the Northeast (U.S) but the hot news this week was further sequencing of the Y chromosome and some new explanations for its survival. Yes survival. Evidently, the Y chromosome, which determines maleness has been losing genes at an alarming rate over the last hundred millenia. This is largely due to the fact that the Y-chromosome does not swap genetic material with the X's and so over time the accumulation of errors erases functioning genes. The suprise this week is that the Y-chromosome appears to repair damage by swapping material with itself. The are certain palindromic sequences e.g., "Able was I ere I saw Elba" that say the same thing left-to-right and right-to-left that run throughout the Y-chromosome and facilitate this repair. The following links can give you all the technical detail you might want, but in the short and I'm quoting here, the way the Y-chromosome survives is by bending over, and "having sex with itself." This will come as no news to the mothers of teenage boys (or the wives of grown men) but to have Onanism validated by science indicates that the march of progresss continues.

On a side note, the preserved genetic differences on the Y-chromosome mean that the genomic gap between men and women may be more pronounced, possibly on the order of 1 - 2% and therefore given the small gap between people and chimps, that men may be as close to male chimps as they are to women of their own species. Stay tuned on that one.

And while I'm overinterpreting data, I find it curious that the number of google results from "y chromosome jokes" and "x chromosome jokes" to closely follow the same male:female (49:51) ratio found in the U.S. Hmmmm, indeed.

NY Times -- Men's Survival Secret

Nature -- Having Sex with Itself