Adam's Curse: A Story of Sex, Genetics and the Extinction of Men [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

He describes the years of research, including many false starts, leading to the identity of the chromosomes determining our gender. Knowledge of the chromosomes came soon after Darwin's revelation of evolution by natural selection. Darwin realized that sex played a fundamental role in the mechanism of evolution, but the details remained an enigma. Unaware of genes, he still managed to envision the role of sexual selection among animals. When the process of cell division was understood, it led to searching for the means by which traits were transmitted through generations. "Dark blobs" observed by a Canadian military physician began the quest for their identity and significance. The find led to identity of the X-chromosome that forms females. The Y-chromosome, which drives a foetus to become a male, was a later discovery.

In Sykes' view, the human male's chromosome has been the major factor in human evolution and cultural development. Not only determining gender, it acts through a feedback loop. More powerful, aggressive males tend to reinforce their role in selecting mates and propagating traits in offspring. While the Sykes' progenitor has nearly ten thousand descendants, the MacDonald clan, long dominant in Scotland, has proliferated around the planet with nearly half a million progeny. The most numerous progeny, however, has resulted in 16 million descendants of Asia's Ghengis Khan scattered throughout Eurasia. The Khan is the most extreme example of the male's propensity for war, conquest, and, in Sykes' view, the "enslavement" of women. His descent into the depths of "political correctness" is brief and shallow, but telling for his thesis.

Today the planet is carpeted with humanity, the result of a society dominated by the Y-chromosome. When hunter-gatherer societies took up agriculture, it "chained women" to "serial pregnancies", depriving them of the "relaxation of a sedentary existence" while producing additional farm workers. The resulting population explosion ultimately drove the creation of our industrialized, polluting society. This condition, in Sykes' view, is now leading to a depletion of the Y-chromosome's prowess. Ultimately, he argues, human males will be replaced by a society of women. Whether men will be kept as breeding stock he doesn't predict.

A practiced adept at metaphor, Sykes' finesse in describing cellular mechanics is unusual in a scientist. He portrays a slow-motion ballet, with chromosomes gently finding their opposite number to "delicately lie alongside each other" until "they are entwined". It's very sensuous genetics. The tone changes when he portrays the head of a sperm entering an egg. The ensuing scene is a battle reminiscent of a Hollywood war film. Mitochondria launch vicious assaults on invaders, slaughtering whatever can be attacked. One wonders how conception ever occurs. It does, of course, but he makes clear that a decline in success is inevitable.

Although Sykes builds a compelling case for the roots of our society's ills, there are too many ignored aspects. He challenges the recent paper by a team demonstrating the Y-chromosome's prowess at self-repair. His arguments require further study, but his adamant insistence smacks of desperation, not evidence. Although this book is a valuable study, there's more work to do. With so much of human evolutionary history to be assessed, we can consider this an important, but not a final, step. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

He is always careful to make it readable and avoids losing the reader. Even more so than Matt Ridley. I know some people are suspicious of this as they think that anyone who writes in such a readable way must be a charlatan. But he is professor of Human Genetics at Oxford so he is much more qualified than anyone likely to be reading this book.

The title Adam's Curse relates to how through sexual selection wealth, power and greed are valued at the expense of the natural world. The most controversial idea in the book is that men will be extinct in about 150,000 years because of falling fertility. However that is only a small part of the book and even if it is disproved does not invalidate the rest of the book which is mostly about sex! Er... sex at a genetic level that is.

I'd recommend this to anyone with an interest in genealogy, human genetics and evolution and likes science to be jargon free and written more like a novel than a science book. Do you ever start reading "popular" science books and not finish them? Although this will not go down in history as a classic piece of science literature it deserves 5 stars because you will finish it.