Y Chromosome Differentiation 180 Million Years Old

Just published in Nature is a study revealing the origins of maleness in mammals. The team of Prof. Henrik Kaessmann at the Center for Integrative Genomics and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics concludes that the key male-differentiating features in the Y chromosome appeared 180 million years ago in placentals and marsupials with the arrival of the sex-determining gene, SRY. Curiously, the AMHY gene, performing the same function in monotremes, appeared independently 175 million years ago. In other words, testicles have been around for a good long while, but not as long as one might have imagined.

The study, which required 29,500 computing hours, was done by isolating special Y chromosome genes among fifteen mammalian species. It is the largest study of the Y chromosome to date. More information can be found in the current issue of Nature or here.

Manhood, Modesty, and Pandemics

The World Health Organization has reported that the death rate of the new MERS virus is higher than SARS (50%) but slower-spreading. Only 90 cases have been reported since last September, most of them in Saudi Arabia. Oddly, 80% of the cases from the past year were men.

Dr. Christian Drosten from the University of Bonn was quoted in The Times of India saying it probably has less to do with manhood and more to do with standards for female modesty.

MERS also appears to be mainly affecting men; nearly 80 percent of the cases in the new study were men. Drosten said there might be a cultural explanation for that. “Women in the [Middle East] region tend to have their mouths covered with at least two layers of cloth,” he said, referring to the veils worn by women in Saudi Arabia. “If the coronavirus is being spread by droplets, [the veils] should give women some protection.”

Oldest Man in Modern History, Dead at 116

According to Genesis 5:27, Methuselah lived a whopping 969 years. But that was before the flood and before Guinness Book of World Records. The longest-living male just died today, Wednesday, at the ripe age of 116. Jiroemon Kimura of Kyotango, Japan, used a low-calorie diet and a good set of genes to get him all the way through the 20th century alive.

116 years, however impressive by itself, is a long way from the all-time world record. It was set far out of reach by Jeanne Louise Calment when she died at age 122 in France. That a woman holds the record got me wondering about the longevity of men vs. women over age 100. It turns out there’s a graph for that, compiled by Afrim Alimeti:

Gerontology Research Group, http://www.grg.org/

One Small Quip for [a] Man…

Neil Armstrong is dead at age 82.  While a half dozen new biographies of the iconic moon-walker will undoubtedly be released in the next year, the truth about him will probably remain well concealed.  Armstrong’s silence throughout his life was deafening.  Where others like Buzz Aldrin learned to live in the limelight, he retreated into the space-like quiet.

Armstrong never sought to be a spokesman.  How ironic he is known for his words!  Even his legendary quip, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” was, by his own belated admission, botched: it was supposed to be “One small step for a man…”  Still, that slogan, correctly delivered or not, stands out precisely because of the personal void around Armstrong.  He ushered the world into the great beyond.

New Avenues for Birth Control Pill for Men

In that perennial quest for the holy grail, the pill for men, scientists are showing a new round of optimism.  Every attempt in recent years has failed due to a host of complications with terminating billions of sperm effectively and without side effect.  Organon’s attempt at an implant failed in trials, for example, despite it being heralded as some kind of messiah-pharmaceutical.  Nevertheless, some new drugs are in testing phase, however, pursuing the prospect of massive sums of money to the winning developers.

James Bradner reports for his squad, which has seen successful results among mice.  The drug JQ1 targets a testis-specific protein, rendering production of sperm impossible.  Bradner reports elsewhere that he suspects the pill for men will be available within a decade.

Indian scientists have developed a gel called RISUG which is injected into the vas deferens in a procedure much like a vasectomy.  The chemical somehow disrupts sperm by electrocuting them with a charge produced by the surface of the polymer.  It is in phase III trials in India as of 2012.

Testosterone undecanoate, currently used with success for hypogonadism, is being considered as a contraceptive.  Chinese researchers report early success in trials with their injection method, which mixes the compound in tea seed oil.  Some permanent infertility was noted, however.

The Venus Transit, Rational Christianity, and Fornicating Gods

The solar transit of Venus – when the planet gets between the earth and the sun, doing so only twice a century – isn’t eliciting much attention in the news today.  That wasn’t the case in 1769, however, when inspired Europeans invested enormous sums of money and energy sending scientists to the edges of the earth.  Those scientists were to write down the exact times Venus entered and left the sun’s field.  By taking one measurement and comparing it to a measurement taken in, say, Tahiti, a mathematician could use parallax to determine the distance of the earth to the sun.  As it turns out, explorers Captain James Cook and Joseph Banks were there in Tahiti at the time to take those planetary measurements.

 

Knowing the distance between the earth and the sun was a big deal in 1769.  Having that kind of knowledge meant humankind could peer into the heart of God’s created order.  Scientists and philosophers became something like gods in the process.  Discoveries like the distance from the sun to the earth (93 million miles, if you must know) did much to spur on the Enlightenment – an explosion of rational thought that, when taken as a religion, mutated Christian orthodoxy into deism and pantheism.  Anglicans like Cook and Banks would venture far from their doctrinal roots.

 

Not that everyone was busy rationalizing Christianity.  For Joseph Banks, basking in the Tahitian sun, there were things more interesting than planetary transits and metaphysics.  His journal says remarkably little about the astronomical observations but plenty about island culture.  He writes that after the transit he partied with a a local chieftain, and shortly thereafter came across some particularly easy women who were effortlessly coaxed into his tent.

 

So much for godhood.

NASA’s Territorial Pissing

With a blog name like “Men on the Moon,” why not talk about men on the moon every once in a while?

With the advent of commercial space flight, the old guard of NASA want businessmen everywhere to know that the moon (at least select parts of it) is their jurisdiction. In July 2011 the world received “NASA’s Recommendations to Space-Faring Entities,” a set of guidelines to private sector missions. The document included parameters for lunar explorations, namely, “exclusion zones” of historically significant areas. The Apollo landing sites, for example, should not be approached by a lander within 2km, and even rovers are prohibited within immediate vicinity.

Is it just me, or is the “preservation” line ringing a little hollow here? Since the surface of the moon is essentially a collection of powder, what is being preserved is NASA’s claims to real estate, which belongs to them by virtue of a set of footprints. One doesn’t have to go to the moon to discern the tell-tale trail they’ve spritzed into the lunar dust.

Why Women Can’t Be Magicians

In her fascinating book Pythagoras’ Trousers, Margaret Wertheim makes the claim that most physicists are male to this day because physics, like organized religion, deals with a knowledge of the “magical” core of the universe.  On a more mundane level, I got to wondering why men often proliferate as magicians (the entertaining sort).  It turns out that 95% of magic club membership is male.  Why?

Peter M. Nardi offers a collection of explanations for the trend in his article “Why Have Women Magicians Vanished?”  He quotes a number of practicing male magicians, some of whom actually claim that women’s anatomy and clothing is what inhibits them from performing magical tricks (e.g., where do you hide the doves if you have to wear tight-fitting clothing, especially around your breasts?).  Such technical problems may exist, but they don’t do much to give a deeper explanation of the dearth of women in the field.   Nardi gets closer to the solution when he says,

Magic has always been presented as something of a fraternity, and for the longest time, magic clubs did not allow women to join (following the trend of most private clubs of the era). The traditional role of a male magician and his female “assistants” is not a social role that is easily transposed into female magician and her male “assistants.” This makes the road to being a successful female magician even harder since they have to create a whole new paradigm of what it is to be a magician in order to succeed.

While Nardi doesn’t elaborate, this insight is at the heart of the problem, in my opinion.  A good male magician must not only appear to control the physical world through magic, he must also demonstrate that he can control the social world, a social world symbolized by his female assistant.  Just as he waves his wand and controls the physical elements (fire, water, hankerchiefs, coffins), so he controls the fate of the young woman, his subject.  Her cheerful demeanor glosses the fact that she assents, almost hypnotically, to the will of the magician.  Through the female assistant the audience is encouraged to trust the magician, and thus social control is asserted.

That is to say, women can’t be magicians, at least of the traditional variety, because it is unacceptable for them to exert social control.  They have no male assistant, no medium, by which to charm the crowd.  They do not stand above the earthly elements, above actual men, above the social world.  Women are not free to work the spectacle.  They must remain the spectacle.

Edward Hitchcock on Rocks, the Feminine and Immortality

Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864), noted geologist, theologian and president of Amherst College, has become, like so many of the lesser polymaths of the nineteenth century, mostly forgotten.  When his name does come up, the lingering Darwinian debates are usually the occasion.  But Hitchcock himself was a fascinating figure – not to mention surprisingly accurate as a scientist – as Nancy Pick uncovers in her delightful book, Curious Footprints: Professor Hitchcock’s Dinosaur Tracks and Other Natural History Treasures at Amherst College (Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2006). 

I too wish to  investigate a new dimension of Hitchcock here: that he was very much a man of his age with regard to his evaluation of femininity.  The dedication to his wife in The Religion of Geology and Its Connected Sciences (1854), read in context of the entire book, identifies femininity as a positive, spiritual force able to lift one beyond the vicissitudes of the natural, physical realm.  Through his wife, Orra, Hitchcock finds romantic resources to understand death as good, and to reassert the value of geology for theological argumentation.

(For those of you wondering, no, I am not related to this particular Prof. Hitchcock.  And yes, I know it smacks of vanity to study authors with the same last name.  Sue me.)

Hitchcock’s bears his heart in The Religion of Geology, not least in its dedication wherein he hymns the virtues of his wife:

Both gratitude and affection prompt me to dedicate these lectures to you. To your kindness and self-denying labors I have been mainly indebted for the ability and leisure to give any successful attention to scientific pursuits. Early should I have sunk under the pressure of feeble health, nervous despondency, poverty, and blighted hopes, had not your sympathies and cheering counsels sustained me. And during the last thirty years of professional labors, how little could I have done in the cause of science, had you not, in a great measure, relieved me of the cares of a numerous family! Furthermore, while I have described scientific facts with the pen only, how much more vividly have they been portrayed by your pencil! And it is peculiarly appropriate that your name should be associated with mine in any literary effort where the theme is geology; since your artistic skill has done more than my voice to render that science attractive to the young men whom I have instructed. I love especially to connect your name with an effort to defend and illustrate that religion which I am sure is dearer to you than every thing else. I know that you would forbid this public allusion to your labors and sacrifices, did I not send it forth to the world before it meets your eye. But I am unwilling to lose this opportunity of bearing a testimony which both justice and affection urge me to give. In a world where much is said of female deception and inconstancy, I desire to testify that one man at least has placed implicit confidence in woman, and has not been disappointed. Through many checkered scenes have we passed together, both on the land and the sea, at home and in foreign countries; and now the voyage of life is almost ended. The ties of earthly affection, which have so long united us in uninterrupted harmony and happiness, will soon be sundered. But there are ties which death cannot break; and we indulge the hope that by them we shall be linked together and to the throne of God through eternal ages (iii-iv).

Hitchcock finds in his wife virtues much in line with anyone concerned with doing the science of geology: she “portrays” and “renders” nature through her artwork, which came with great “labors and sacrifices.”  She has no similitude with “female deception and inconstancy.”  Instead, just like the natural order itself, she has divulged her secrets and been reliable, even as reliable as the clockwork of the geological record itself. 

More outstanding, in my analysis, is Mrs. Hitchcock’s super-natural virtues: that she provides cheering counsel, that she relieves her husband of cares, that she makes geology “attractive to the young men,” drawing them to the beauty of the earth by graphical portrayals.  Her devoted love has been so trustworthy that Prof. Hitchcock finds in his wife a basis for immortality.  Just as he looks through the geological record to find God, so he looks through his wife to discover the “ties which death cannot break.”  In her and with her and beyond her lies the truth of the spiritual realm, the eternal frontier of the kingdom of God.

Trepidation in the face of death could very easily be understood as the real theme of The Religion of Geology.  Hitherto Hitchcock’s literature was more plainly apologetical, following William Paley’s program of natural theology to defend Christian doctrines like the existence of God, the veracity of Genesis as pure historical fact, and the reliability of the scriptures in general.  His apologetic continues in The Religion of Geology, but something has changed.  He writes the book in his advanced age; medical problems have forced him to look not at, but beyond fossils and sedimentary layers in order to find assurance of eternal life.  The secrets of geology, when divulged, should reveal the goodness of God.  But for Hitchcock one brute fact manifests itself contrarywise: the history of the world has been a history of death.  That our own physical deaths will have been preceded by billions of prior deaths suggests the great counterfactual to the goodness of God and His creation.  The harmonization of the perfect benevolence of God with the existence of evil on earth “is the grand problem of theology” (248).  Where is God’s purpose in the repeated extermination of every life form on earth?  More to the point, Where is God’s purpose in the dissolution of the Hitchcock family?  Death appears to vaunt itself as the great Dis-order in the midst of divine Order.

Hitchcock cannot draw a line between death and God’s goodness.  So with regular intervals in The Religion of Geology, he appeals to a sort of transcendent reasoning, claiming that humans in their fallen condition would not be perfectly happy in a perfect, deathless world.  That kind of world would be the greatest torment.  Instead, God brought evil upon the creation in its natural state, giving humans “a world as is adapted for a condition of trial and preparation for a higher state, when both mind and body would be delivered from the fetters that now cramp their exercise” (110).  Geology can only suggest this; faith must claim it.  In this case the physical realm points beyond itself, indeed, against itself, to yield the spiritual reality.  “Death shows us that we shall ere long be introduced into a second act, and affords a presumption that other acts-it may be in an endless series-will succeed, before the whole plot shall have passed before us,” claims Hitchcock.  “And if thus early we can catch glimpses of great benefit to result from these evils, what full conviction, that infinite benevolence has planned and consummated the whole, will be forced upon the mind, when the vast panorama of God’s dispensations shall lie spread out in the memory!” (111).  Who will deliver Hitchcock from his body of death?  Oddly enough, death itself must rescue him from him from death.  Only the physical enemy itself is the savior, the “essential means of delivering this immortal being from his ruin and misery” (248).  In this way Hitchcock adopts the common but perverse logic of Christians of the Victorian period. 

But to the point: Returning to the dedication to his wife, Hitchcock’s words about the “female deception and inconstancy” having been turned to “cheering counsels” in his wife make more sense.  Femaleness as such does not reflect the spiritual.  Rather, her inner, spiritual, feminine resources have made her into a glorious creature.  United to her in love, knit to her feminine consolations, it is impossible for Hitchcock to imagine anything but immortality.  His wife is nature’s secret: that beyond death, beyond deception, beyond the womanly body, there is eternal life.  “Early should I have sunk under the pressure of feeble health, nervous despondency, poverty, and blighted hopes, had not your sympathies and cheering counsels sustained me,” says he.  She has delivered him thus far, and she will guide and accompany him to his heavenly home.   She patches the death-gap between creation and revelation.  Verily, through her feminine talents she illustrates for him the secrets of the created order. 

At first glance it seems strange that so passionate a dedication to his wife would accompany Hitchcock’s commentary on geology.  I suggest that the book hardly makes sense without the dedication.  In his wife the aged professor finds a feminine spirit through whom he can acknowledge the goodness of God in the face of death.  He finds a woman in whom nature’s corruption is revealed to be nature’s means to immortality.  Indeed, Mrs. Hitchcock frees her husband to again laud the religious value of earth science:

Misunderstood or misinterpreted though this science has been, [geology] now offers her aid to fortify some of the weakest outposts of religion. And thus shall it ever be with all true science. Twin sister of natural and revealed religion, and of heavenly birth, she will never belie her celestial origin, nor cease to sympathize with all that emanates from the same pure home. Human ignorance and prejudice may for a time seem to have divorced what God has joined together. But human ignorance and prejudice shall at length pass away, and then science and religion shall be seen blending their parti-colored rays into one beautiful bow of light, linking heaven to earth and earth to heaven (177-8).