The Y chromosome isn't going extinct after all!

            Previous research has suggested the Y sex chromosome, which only men carry, is decaying genetically so fast that it will be extinct in five million years. David Page, the director of MIT's Whitehead Institute, has spent the last decade trying to prove this wrong. He compares the Y chromosome of the Rhesus macaque, a monkey that diverged from our evolutionary ancestors about 25 million years ago.  When Page did this research he found that the Rhesus Y chromosome has not changed for 25 million years. On the other hand our chromosome has lost 3% of a small segment of the Y chromosome. A genetic professor Brian Sykes predicts the demise of the Y chromosome, in as little as 100,000 years in his 2003 book Adam's Curse: A Future without Men. But luckily men aren't going to be gone for a long time.

I really liked this paper just from the title alone. It drew me in and I had to read it. It was interesting to know that Page compared our chromosome to Rhesus monkeys and found similarities. Another cool fact was that the Y chromosome has 78 genes while the X chromosome has 800 genes attached to it. That fact blew my mind and hopefully yours as well.