With chimps, that is. I wonder if, when they do the same kind of research on humans, this will be true for us. On the other hand, you just have to go to a football game or bar to make that idea seem unlikely.
Having said that, apparently humans generally are evolving faster nowadays than in the past. Guess the anti-evolution crowd has got it wrong.
A provocative and intriguing new study reveals that past thought on the Y chromosome, the chromosome that instructs mammals to develop into males, may be entirely flawed and that the chromosome, previously thought to evolving at a crawl, may in fact be evolving far faster than other chromosomes. Human females typically have two X chromosomes, while males have an X and a Y chromosome.
It was previously thought that autosomes (non-sex chromosomes) and the X sex chromosome featured greater diversity (faster evolution) than the Y sex chromosome, a smaller chromosome. According to the new study, led by Jennifer Hughes, a postdoctoral researcher in Whitehead Institute Director David Page’s lab. The research indicates that primate males may be evolving significantly faster than females.
[…]
One thing that may be driving faster evolution of the male sex chromosome is differing mating habits between species. Where as humans typically take a single partner during sexual intercourse, numerous chimpanzees often mate with a single female in a short time period. Males who produce more sperm, or whose sperm is better at impregnating females will have a better chance at beating the other males’ sperm and passing on his genes.To give an idea of just how profound this effect is, the difference between the rest of the human and chimp chromosomes is only 2 percent. That means that the male sex chromosome is evolving nearly 15 times faster, or more, on average than the female genome.



















