Introduction
There seems to be a move a foot to diminish the role that a human male plays in the conception, gestation and upbringing of a child. With the advancement in genetic engineering and the overall surge in scientific understanding of how "it" all works, there are those in the research community that see a future, perhaps, that is maleless. The idea seems preposterous, but this paper is going to try and show the reasons behind the movement to do away with manhood, and show why those who believe in that seemingly dystopic, amazonian future are for the most part wrong. This paper is going to make assumptions, cast aspersions, and derive truth from other's own facts. With a look into some elementary genetics and the use of evolutionary biology and psychology, (with a little socio-economic data thrown in for good measure) this paper proposes to show the actual need for the masculine gender.
History
Before the latter half of the twentieth century the female half of the human species was considered what Simone de Beauvoir called "the second sex". From the beginning of written thought women were claimed to be inferior. Aristotle wrote in one of his earliest works, Generation of Animals, " A woman is, as it were, a mutilated man, for it is through a certain incapacity that the female is female". That was the thought. Women were just incomplete, incapacitated men. In fact Aristotle wrote, "the female is opposite to the male". Women were the opposite, not the cute yin-yang idea but opposite. If men are powerful and write laws, fight wars, etc. then what of the females? These ideas cannot be overstated. Women from the beginning were an after thought. Even their genitalia were seen as nothing more than those of a male turned inside out. The Judeo-Christian Bible tells us that females were derived from one of Adam's ribs. This implication is that women are a “derived, sullied form of the pure masculine source”. Man was created while women were derived. These thoughts paint the bleak picture that were paternally driven ideas behind sexual prejudice. Even when Henking found the X chromosome in 1890 it was so named because he thought it to be "extra". Here was a key discovery in biology, albeit the biology of a bed bug, and a scientist thought it to be extra or outside. It may have been just circumstance, but it was a fairly unnerving coincidence to see the female side of our genetic makeup as somehow not necessary.
From the start sperm was always thought to be, if not the key but even, the only ingredient in creating offspring. Women were inseminated and man was doing the inseminating. Man was doing the actual deed while in the woman's case the deed was being done to her. It did not help that when Nettie Stevens made her discovery of the Y chromosome, she realized that it was a masculine chromosome, the Y, that actually determined whether or not a couples offspring was one sex or the other. This amelioration was more fuel to the sexually discriminate fire. At first glance this was huge. The female had no control over her offsprings sexual determination. The man had control.
So when Gibbon stated in his, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, "In ever age and country, the wiser, or at least the stronger, of the two sexes, has usurped the powers of the state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life.", he was talking about the modern state of sexual affairs in the twentieth century. Not only was it political power that men held but to go even further would be to say that this created a mindset that would be hard to question. That mindset is that if the males held all powers social, legal, political, etc., then why would not the scientific research and findings favor a world in which discoveries were skewed to the masculine side.
For the shift away from a paternally controlled genetic environment, one can look in another field that of economics and sociology to find the beginnings of male's lack of importance. In his writings on Socialism, Marx wrote, " the real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production!". Who else was saying these things let alone being a male. Karl would never know how prophetic his words were. In the study of gender roles and sexual reproductive responsibilities, one can see how far the proverbial pendulum has come.
Guilt
Above is shown the idea of the female gender in the sexual world prior to the "enlightened" twentieth century. And to best express how far ideas have come we should look at the progress that has been made since. We should look at the point at which the pendulum has reached today. In his book, Y: The Descent of Man, Steve Jones writes that, "Man himself may in the end become redundant, for his sperm can be grown in animal testes, and in mice at least an egg can be fertilized with a body cell from another female, which cuts out the secondary sex altogether". Let's look at that passage a little closer. One can easily see the echoes of those ideas through the halls of manhood, but look a little closer toward the end of the sentence: "...the secondary sex...". He is talking about men. Where once females were considered second now man is becoming the lesser. Jones goes on to state that, "(man's) sole task is to fecundate his more efficient spouse". At least he still uses the word spouse. It seems men are still allowed to marry the first sex.
Could the Bible have been wrong? Were we not the first sex like it seems to state? For was it not Adam who "begat a son in his own likeness". It seemed completely rational to not include the woman in that line.
But, now it is the opposite. One need only look at modern genetics to see further research into how unimportant males really seem to be. So a look at what seems to be the essence of maleness is in order. The Y chromosome has long been known to determine whether or not the offspring is male. If a Y chromosome is present it is a male. If it is not then it is a female, plain and simple. But , the fact is the Y chromosome is not that daunting when it is compared to its robust partner the X chromosome. Comparing the two, one sees that on an X chromosome there are ten times the genes that code for proteins than on a Y chromosome. Easily read one can see the X has more genetic information to pass on, and therefore is more important. In deed Bainbridge even states the Y chromosome is, "...a sad, shrunken, vestigial thing". He calls the Y a vestigial thing. Upon reading this one can feel the guilt just oozing. This is a man writing those words. He is implying that the essential chromosome that makes a man is going to eventually shrivel up and disappear. For that is what vestigial means. Jones seems to agree when he states that the Y, "... is the most decayed, redundant, and parasitic of the lot". He does not go on to write why he thinks the Y chromosome is parasitic, but by writing that the Y is decayed would seem to make mention that it once was more vital than its present state. In fact he writes, but does not explain that, "DNA hints that the crucial structure (Y) was once the equal of its larger associate the X..." Jones goes on to write that, "... man's defining structure is a haven for degenerates". Could any one imagine this information being read or written just two hundred years ago. The pendulum has swung quickly. So we are now products of a decayed and slowly shriveling chromosome. We were once the first and most important sex. The ancients used to believe that sperm itself could produce a child. Now we are not nearly as vital. In fact researchers have found that one simple gene on the entire chromosome is what makes us male. They have taken us apart so thoroughly that we have come down to just one simple gene. The gene was discovered in 1990, "the true keeper of the keys to masculinity was discovered, a gene called Sry, an abbreviation of the rather unpoetic ""sex-determining region on the Y chromosome."" There it is. The larger, stronger, and more powerful gender is different (essentially) by one gene. But, to make male's size even less of an issue, an article titled, “Mate Choice and Sexual Selection" states that, "modern humans are less sexually dimorphic than any of our predecessor species (including archaic Homo sapiens)". This would seem to mean that women and men are eventually going to be the same size, and then there goes the whole power issue like Gibbon stated. Is this all guilt? What else could it be. For centuries men thought they were the vital cog in the reproductive process. Now in a little over one hundred years we see a total shift to the other side of the gender spectrum. For a quick, historical, supporting citation one need only look to Baker and Bellis and read their statement that, " it was not until the late 1800's, when sperm were first seen fertilizing eggs (in starfish and sea urchins), that a role for the female in conception was acknowledged ", and see how far the pendulum has travelled in such a short period of time.
Response
Let us go in reverse. Above was stated that all that is necessary to produce a male child is the presence of the gene Sry. In fact this is true. It is a powerful gene and pure. "Unlike most genes it has no inserted sequences of useless material". And when scientists inserted the Sry gene in a XX embryo at a point when the gonads were "indifferent" (read as not yet gendered) the baby was born as a male, albeit an XX male. The process was so complete after inserting that one gene that the XX male was completely accepted by its siblings as male and was found suitable for mating. The same worked if it was absent. If the Sry gene is removed from an XY embryo then the baby is born female. So men still have power after all. This little, but powerful, gene kicks in for a short period of time at about four weeks after conception, and determines maleness exactly.
Now at the chromosome level we stated above that the Y chromosome was filled with decay and gaps of genetic material. Here is the kicker though, no matter how many X chromosome are present at conception, if there is but one Y chromosome then the child is male. Even in XXXXY babies, they are still male. Even the gaps and decayed material it seems is useful for some reasons. Jones states that, "Celibacy has ruined man's chromosome." Maybe this ruination is for a good purpose.
Looking again to Jones for information to support the importance of the male, he states:
"Males act in their own interests but as an incidental perform a vital role inevolution, for they act as conduits through which genes move between females. Without their help, all new mutations would be confined to the direct descendents of the indivual in which they arise and life would at once become a multitude of clones rather than a set of unstable biological alliances formed anew each time sperm meets egg. Men bring women together. They make links between families and allow genes to be tested against nature in new and perhaps frutiful coalitions".
We can use reasoning to see how vital this male role is to evolution. There are two ways in which human evolution could go if there were no males to spread the mutations both useful and otherwise. We could either see a species, much like crocodiles and great white sharks, where little if any mutations occured in the past umteen millenia. Or, we would see a thin line of separate mutations the would not last and where all the "new species could not survive by themselves. For the purpose of this paper the latter seems more logical, because where would the mutations themselves come from. When the X and the Y chromosome come together in recombination it is the Y's gaps and useless information that in fact produces the new mutations, both useful and otherwise. These gaps between useful genes on the Y chromosome add, "statistics to nature for without it every child would be an exact copy of its parent". Notice he wrote parent and not parents. Further, it is the recombination of these X and Y chromosome that means, "sex and not death, is the great leveler. It allows new and hopeful blends to appear each generation and can get rid of ( or add ) several damaged pieces."
Above was stated that the Y chromosome was parasitic, and Jones in fact states that males themselves are parasitic. "Males are, in many ways, parasites upon their partners. Their interests are to persuade the other party to invest in reproduction, while doing as little as they can themselves". The fact that males do as little as they can may not make them parasites, and their overall investment will be discussed later, but this analogy helps to show the benefits of males again. Jones himself describes the symbiotic nature of parasite and host and shows the benefits, "the parasite , whatever it may be, constantly test its host's fortifications with new mechanisms of virulence - which in turn are fended off ". This creates a balanced nature between parasite and host, or male and female, which seems to benefit both and the entire species.
Further Response - Socio-Economic
Baker and Bellis state in their paper, "Human Sperm Competition", that , "there is not a stage of the reproductive process at which females do not have some facility for family planning". In fact they go on to state that the natural fact that women have a cervix endows them with the "influence whether and which sperm reach the sperm storage organs". There can be little doubt that the female of the human species has most of the control when it comes to conception, but there are other factors that come in to play for evolution to work even on an individual mate-pair basis. If we look back to the article "Mate Choice..." and read, "evolution is concerned not simply with the numbers of offspring an individual produces in a lifetime, but with the numbers of those offspring that successfully reach adulthood and reproduce in their turn" . And we can read in "Human Sperm...", that, "in its modern sense, family planning is the regulation of the timing, spacing and number of children to match some individually perceived optimum ". We see that not only the timing (female) but an optimum is essential in producing and raising a child. This paper asserts that that optimum is resources, and more to the point those resources are investment from the male side of the copulating couple.
Baker and Bellis write that, " the stress and damage that a female may suffer through an untimely attempt to raise a child may reduce her chances or ability to reproduce ". It would seem then that the stress and rigors of child rearing would be eased and the damage she may incur reduced if her partner could contribute. The "Mate Choice..." article reads that the contribution in modern societies is typically, "wealth and/or status (both being means of purchasing the required provisions)". This not only benefits the female, but the article states that, "whenever males can influence the success of rearing, (providing provisions, ie. money) it will pay them to do so".
"Human males are, however, more constrained than other mammals because newborn offspring require care from both parents...", that statement along with the fact also asserted in the “Mate Choice..." article of, "a child's chances of surviving depend crucially on the wealth of the parents (usually inherited or earned by the father)". That is the point of this socio-economic role of males in child rearing. If a female has a male to aid in the raising of child then that child has a better chance to survive to produce offspring itself. This assertion is supported even in today's modern society shown by an article in the
BBC News in April of 1999, that showed that babies born to single mothers are at a greater risk of death than those with both parents raising the child. It also states that the greater death risk is seen in children up to the age of four. If the fact that a baby is born to a single mother is correlated with a greater chance of that baby dying then let us look at those families in the U.S.
According to the U.S. Census figures of 2000 there are 12.5 million single parent families with a female as the head of the household. This is compared to 55.5 million married couple households. We have stated above that a child chances of survival is dependent upon the financial role a father plays in its upbringing, and the greater the "role" (ie. the more money the father earns), the better the chances of survival. Then we can fairly say that a child's chances are far more in jeopardy when that family, be it single parent female or married, is below the poverty line. According to the above stated census figures there 3.3 million single parent female household below the poverty line. That is 26.5% of all families that are headed by a single female. Compare that with 2.7 million married couple households and one can see that those comprise only 4.9% of all married couple households. If there is a child in a single parent female household, then that child has over a five time greater chance of living in poverty. To make this idea even more scary is that of all the children in the U.S. that live in single family households 84% live with female heads of households. If poverty level is not convincing enough the one need only look to the income figures from the U.S. Census and compare those of married couple households and single parent female households. The average salary earned in the U.S. by married couple is $73,300, and the average salary earned by single parent females is $33,400. One can easily see that married couples earned more than double. If a household in today's society earns less than $10,000, it could be easily agreed upon that those children in those families are at the greatest risk of not surviving. Out of all the families in the U. S. 2.6% of married couples earn below $10,000 and of all the single parent female families 18.5% do not earn $10,000. Those are stark statistics when one realizes that a child in a single parent female household has almost a nine times greater chance of living in the most dire conditions. It is not hard to infer from this data that a father in a household (along with of course a mother) greatly increases the chance that a child will not live in poverty. To bring it closer to home, of all the families in Pennsylvania according to the U.S. Census 2000 figures, out of all 1.6 million households below the poverty line 70% of those are single parent female households. Beyond the socio-economic benefits for the child, as well as the mortality rate, the same seems to go for females in the maternalistic role. “Theoreticians have traditionally emphasized direct fitness benefits to females in species with extensive male parental care.” , this quote implies the benefits of the male for the female directly.
Summary
Bill McKibben writes in his book, Enough, " Man's power to control nature is fast becoming the power to exceed all human limits, imperiling the very existence of our species ". Perhaps that is a little drastic, perhaps not. When it is not hard to imagine a future where designer children are commonplace and where copulation in a laboratory is the norm, maybe society needs to take a long hard look around and notice we are not far off. Mckibben states that in parts of western Europe today,1 out of every 5 births are through In vitro fertilization, and IVF in the U.S. is fast becoming commonplace for infertile as well as fertile couples. How far of a stretch is it to imagine when artificial chromosome are inserted into embryos or human eggs, and copulation becomes unnecessary?
The above stated facts and data are meant to show the importance of males in the evolution of our species, and it is scary when there is a reality that is perhaps not far off when producing offspring without males is "doable".
