Some one hundred years ago, scientists, doctors and intellectuals of diverse kinds grew deeply concerned about the significance of sexual difference. The sex wars, not to mention the male preoccupation with enigmatic Eve, are obviously much older than the fin de siècle. In the late nineteenth century, however, these enduring questions acquired new relevance from the emergence of feminism, and the biological sciences had, by then, grown sufficiently mature and confident to analyse the nature and broader significance of sex in scientific or, at least, scientific-sounding terms. As women demanded higher education, the vote and equality and some of them threatened, like Ibsen’s Nora, to slam the door on domesticity, the new science of gender sought to establish that women’s domestic role was ordained by biology rather than social injustice. Those women who wanted to march into the outer world were contravening laws far more profound than they realised. Nature had designed woman to perpetuate the species, not to conjugate Latin verbs, practise medicine or run empires.

Disobeying Nature’s decree would bring disaster to individuals as well as humanity itself. Education would deplete the nervous energy women needed for menstruation and pregnancy and cause a range of disorders from madness to sterility, warned the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley in 1874. It was femininity itself, with its profoundly sexual and reproductive obligations, that was the greatest opponent of woman’s emancipation, observed the Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger in 1903. Comparing the static ovum with the agile and restless spermatozoon, Patrick Geddes and J Arthur Thomson explained that females – ‘passive, conservative, sluggish, and stable’ – preserved ‘the constancy and integrity of the species’ whilst males, on the other hand, were ‘more active, energetic, eager, passionate, and variable’ and therefore, ‘very frequently the leaders in evolutionary progress’. These differences were primordial: they could be reduced but not obliterated without restarting the entire evolutionary process. ‘What was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament’, they harrumphed in their influential 1889 treatise, The Evolution of Sex. One could multiply such examples at will. The point is that ever since the late nineteenth century, biologically-inclined thinkers have been reiterating that females were biologically conservative and passive, whilst males were aggressive, outgoing and all-conquering. The details of those older theories may seem quaint today, but the overall approach remains highly popular. If you doubt that, just take a look at Bryan Sykes’s new book.

Sykes, of course, is neither an amateur nor a woman-hater. (We shall see later that he is the prophet of a resurgent femininity.) What unites him with often repulsive fin-de-siècle theorists is his unquestioning assumption that the fundamental truth about gender relations is to be found in biology rather than society. Being a geneticist, he reduces the manifold differences between the sexes to the difference between the Y chromosome, the locus of masculinity, and the mitochondria, which carry those bits of DNA that are quintessentially female and never transmitted through the male. The tale begins with a revealing anecdote. On being asked whether he was related to another man called Sykes, our hero promptly decides to compare his Y chromosome with that of his namesake. On finding to his amazement that their genetic fingerprints were identical, he follows the trail to a Yorkshire village, where the Sykes originated. Since he has previously shown through the study of mitochondria that all the women of Europe are descended from seven primordial women (see his previous book The Seven Daughters of Eve), Sykes is delighted that the Y chromosome might be used to chart the genealogy of men. He provides us with a potted history of the discovery of the sex chromosomes and instructs us lucidly on the basis of sexual genetics. (Despite a weakness for Boy’s Own Paper-type chapter titles – ‘Blood of the Vikings’, ‘The Sperm of Tara’, ‘Gaia’s Revenge’ – Sykes writes far better than the average scientist.)

But that is just the beginning: it quickly dawns on him that in the Y chromosome and in the mitochondria, he has discovered the key to sex and, indeed, to human history. Mankind has evolved in the way it has because of the ruthless competition between Y and the mitochondria and the process of sexual selection, whereby carriers of mitochondria (i.e. women) have bred with the richest and most (socially and economically) powerful possessors of Y chromosomes (i.e. men). Sexual selection operates throughout the animal kingdom, of course, but in animals, it could reach a point where the finery of the male might go so over the top as to prevent breeding. In humans, however, there is no natural limit to riches and power. Human sexual selection need never stop. Sykes deplores this unreservedly, blaming all the woes of our planet on it. ‘Without labouring the point’, he laments,

already within my lifetime we have been on the brink of a nuclear war, in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and, even as I write, a war is under way in the Middle East. Forests are being cleared at an alarming rate, oil pollutes the beaches and acid rain falls from the skies … all of this can be traced to the fundamental genetic differences between men and women and the way in which female “choice”, in its many guises, has encouraged the exaggeration of these trends. Of course, it would all be quickly reversed if women preferred to mate with men who held assets that were the antithesis of wealth and power, and if the purposely wasteful displays of Ferrari and Rolex were no longer effective. Then the runaway train of sexual selection would soon slow down. Where Eve chooses to go, Adam is bound to follow’ (p. 276).

None of that, Sykes admits, is likely to happen but there is some cause for optimism. For all is not well with the Y chromosome.

The Y chromosome does not recombine significantly during cell division and does not, therefore, get the opportunity to correct mutation-induced damage. The accumulation of such mutations has now reduced the chromosome into ‘a graveyard of rotting genes’. ‘It is’, in short, ‘a dying chromosome and one day it will become extinct’ (p. 284). Rising figures of male infertility reinforce the hypothesis and within about 125,000 years, Sykes predicts, the Y chromosome and man as we know him might become extinct. Will that be the end of the human species, then? Possibly not – the chromosomes of the Caucasian mole vole Ellobius lutescens tell us that male animals can exist without Y chromosomes, as long as the male-creating genes have been transferred to other chromosomes. Perhaps we could follow the example of Ellobius with genetic engineering and create a New XX Man. Another option is to let men become extinct and keep the species going by fertilising ova with the nuclei, not of sperm as currently happens, but of another ovum. All the children would then be girls (but not clones) and the human species would consist only of women. Turning monosexual would be a boon, Sykes avers, for the species as well as the planet. ‘Sperm no longer fight for access to eggs. There are no sperm to do battle, no Y-chromosomes to enslave the feminine. The destructive spiral of greed and ambition fuelled by sexual selection diminishes, and the sickness of our beautiful planet eases. The world no longer reverberates to the sound of men’s clashing antlers and the grim repercussions of conflict. The great sexual experiment is over. Mitochondria have triumphed and Gaia can go back to sleep’ (p. 303). Sweet dreams!

I am only a historian and not qualified to judge the scientific content of Sykes’s book. What I can say, however, is that the end of masculinity has been one of the intellectual spectres of humanity for the last hundred-odd years, even if no one has scratched man so completely off the planet. Writers have differed, of course, in their attitude toward the theme: some have feared the prospect of a world without virile men, others have accepted it stoically, and yet others have blamed it all on the other sex. Many, perhaps most, of these observers, regardless of their actual training, have tried to make sense of the phenomenon with whatever might be the fashionable science of the age. For the fin-de-siècle figures I mentioned at the beginning, it was usually a combination of evolutionary biology, endocrinology and various kinds of vague hereditarianism, including but not limited to eugenics. Then came a vogue for endocrinology alone, succeeded by the less biological concepts of psychoanalysis and now, obviously, we have the ultimate form of biological reductionism and determinism: genetics. Books like Adam’s Curse have always tended to trace the plight of males and the sorrows of the world to some unitary flaw, whether sexual selection or the glandular secretions of the testicle.

Today, science has reached technical heights undreamed of in the 1900s but in their understanding of society and humanity, biologists may not have advanced very far. To attribute the war in Iraq, for instance, to the ruthless quest of George Bush, Jr’s Y-chromosome (or, for that matter, Tony Blair’s or Donald Rumsfeld’s) to win the sexual selection race, even if correct in biological terms, is merely to supply miscreants, idiots, liars and the simply misguided with an excuse not to change anything for 125,000 years or however long it is going to take the world to become female. ‘It ain’t me, guv – it’s me Y-chromosome’! In the impatience with which Adam’s Curse brushes away the relevance of social, economic, political, cultural and psychological factors to the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind, in its single-minded quest for one unchanging, biological cause for a galaxy of complex social problems, and, above all, in its apocalyptic speculations and fantastical prognostications, this book is only the latest exemplar of a venerable and rather tired tradition.

Chandak Sengoopta
School of History
Classics and Archaeology
Birkbeck College, University of London

CHANDAK SENGOOPTA, formerly a physician and psychiatrist, is Senior Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Otto Weininger: Sex, Science and Self in Imperial Vienna (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was Born in Colonial India (Macmillan, 2003).