Warring Ys

I was watching a movie scene of some ancient war and found myself frowning, amazed at the concentration of testosterone in these male warriors, armed to the teeth, grunting, and fully garbed with ornate armors and battle gear sewn by their wives, mothers and sisters to conquer new territories. I do not know of any famous war or battle where you find women in droves of hundreds or thousands, exuding that much enthusiasm and excitement while charging toward the enemy faced with the real prospect of death that meant permanent separation from their children. It is no big secret insight from much of human history that it is the men, bearers of the Y chromosome, who have predominantly taken it upon themselves to realize dual humongous fantasies: that world peace can be had if you massively exterminate the perceived enemy in an enterprise called "war," and two, that in the process, they can also perform seeding the world with "Y" chromosomes in imperial proportions and that this was what fathering was all about – that seeding was parenting.

I do not mean to be facetious or diminish the "honor" attached to this gentleman’s code of blowing each other up and decapitating each other in the battlefield but when I see a wife or mother in tears as she bids goodbye to her Y warrior, I am not alone in suspecting that it is not only out of love but out of threat of loss that the children may suffer. Fatherless lives of children. I do not know if they had the equivalent Father’s Day in the Samurai or Ancient European era but if so, these fathers would be conspicuously absent on those Father’s Day celebrations.

I used to think that maybe it is really just some cultural conditioning that had caused this predominantly male drive to war. But then again I wonder if maybe there is a basic thread of maleness that had really ran from the first Adams to these human warriors in human history such that we cannot shake it off altogether despite what I would like to think is our evolving human intelligence. Just like in my mitochondrial DNA is written my link to my mitochondrial Eve, which I share with all women in the world, is there a "nuclear Adam"? "Nuclear" because the Y chromosome is found in the nucleus, together with the other chromosomes, while mitochondria, the one through which a Mitochondrial Eve is traced, is found outside the nucleus and is passed only from mothers to daughters. Bryan Sykes, who wrote "The Seven Daughters of Eve" (Norton, New York and London, 2001) devoted a chapter to the most recent scientific attempts to trace our modern Adams to a common Adam to see if Adam’s story will be consistent with the story of Eve.

I found good news: the Y chromosome carries a lot of potential information to make sense of – stretching for about 60 million bases (DNA is made up of four nucleotide bases – Adenine, Thymine, Guanine and Cytosine that repeat themselves; the entire human genome has three billion base pairs). The bad news, however, is that it doesn’t seem to since most of that is filled with what scientists call "junk DNA" which just means they have no obvious functions. So here gentlemen, there is room yet for all those self-proclaimed mysteries in your maleness yet hidden from the scientific community. But not to dampen your enthusiasm, a Y-mate of yours, a favorite of mine, geneticist Dr. Steve Jones in his book, "Y, The Descent of Men," made it a point to note that this plethora of encoded information also makes it more susceptible for errors in mutation. So the choice for all that information on the Y chromosome so far, it seems to me, is teetering on either just being "useless" or being "wrong." Maybe it’s just me but when I think of "war," they are also adjectives that naturally descend to describe it.

But anyway, back to whether our modern wandering Adams can be traced to a more basic Adam in genetic history we can all study for our own enlightenment and amusement. To cut a long scientific story short, yes, it seems that at least for European Adams, there was a common gene pool of Adams that can be mostly traced to the hunters of the Paleolithic age. I do not know what kind of strong a link, if any, can be made between war histories and genetic histories but that is something I hope some researchers would look into so that at the very least, we can include that link when we educate our Adams about nurture versus nature and that genes are not destiny, especially if "destiny" is looking like "war" all the time in human history.

Well, education, of course, or I was thinking massive, prescribed doses of "oxytocin," the hormone responsible for feelings of nurturing and care for progeny, the same one which may explain how wives would lovingly sew warrior outfits for their men. That is, until I read a story by Scientific American science writer Steve Mirsky about two gentlemen who wanted to steal some prohibited, heroin-like drug called OxyContin from a veterinarian’s office in Indiana but in a burst of confusion (maybe it was not their fault but the result of all that useless information spread out in their Y chromosome), got mixed up with the spelling and stole instead "oxytocin," that enlarged their nipples and made them tender, coupled with a bonus tendency to nurture and cuddle everyone in their midst. That would have all worked out well summarily for male wisdom if these men were sent to war when they were caught. But they were sent, of course, to jail, to an all-male prison. I leave it to your imagination how these Ys must have fared, reeling from the effects of oxytocin in a testosterone-built and populated playground.

Happy Father’s Day.

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