Something I read in a trivia book recently; that a human female is genetically closer to our last common ancestor with chimps than a human male; the reason being that the Y chromosome in humans has in the last 100,000 years mutated far more than the XX configuration.
Is there any truth in this? I have a hard time believing that she is closer to this than he is.
No comment, except on the last line, and without even clicking on the links: if you find one pygmy who is taller than one Watusi, it doesn’t refute the assertion that in general Watusi are taller than pygmies.
Well, there are myriad other examples I could have picked, but I believe those illustrated my confusion the best. 
If that’s true (and I suppose it could be), it’s just not a very useful definition of ‘closer’.
I dunno. That trick they have of very effective bipedalism and a 10cm space in the hips is a tough act to follow.
This is coverage of the Nature article (don’t think free access is available) that seems to have sparked the tidbit.
Not quite “women are closer to chimps than men.” More Y chromosomes from humans and chimps have more mutations from the Y chromosome of our common ancestor than X chromosomes.
And more importantly, it pointed against the notion that the Y chromosome was “degrading” and would eventually be a collection of inactive genes. (An article on that idea).
Since all men have an X, and the freedom of Y to mutate is because we can survive a fault in the Y because of a functional X, I find this claim to be pretty ridiculous.
It’s also playing some word games. Genetic closeness doesn’t really indicate any kind of progress or similarity. For example, what if chimps had changed more from some common ancestor than humans did? Would you then argue that humans were more primitive or less-evolved? It might make sense in a narrow scientific meaning, but it would not make sense using common English definitions of those words.
Sounds like a bar pick-up line.
This statement makes little sense that I can make out.
The article is not talking about random drift; it is making the argument that the huge changes in Y are the result of some significant selective pressures.
In a strict sense it does mean that male humans and male chimps are more genetically divergent than are female human and female chimps. Not “better” or “worse” and neither is more “primitive” or more “progressed” … just more and less different. The next question is of course finding out what those differences are correlated with. Are human sperm just more different than chimp sperm than human eggs are from chimp eggs? Or do these diffenrences have, as the article speculates, some broader consequences? It does mean that the genes left on the Y are not just inconsequential vestiges; they do something of significance, something other than what is on X, and something that is under significant selective pressure. Even if we do not know what that something is.
So hybridization is more likely if the human is the female rather than the male. Interesting.
If you don’t want to pick up, yeah.
You’ve never had wild monkey sex with someone you met in a bar?
As I understand, it is true that the Y chromosome has changed more than the X chromosome because there is no way to help correct for damaged/mutated Ys as there is for damaged/mutated Xs. So, just going from the fact that females have XX and males have XY, then and the Ys have greater variance, it could be argued that on a strictly pairwise comparison female humans and female chimps are closer than male humans and male chimps. But that’s a naive and, it seems to me, an essentially meaningless comparison. As others mentioned, just the raw difference itself doesn’t really mean anything about one gender being more or less evolved than the other but what really makes it essentially meaningless is that it doesn’t really make sense to try to compare the two genders of two different species like that, it’s the species as whole that is adapted, even if perhaps certain adapations are only present in one gender or the other.
So, perhaps it’s interesting as a bit of trivia that the Y chromosome has changed more than the X, but that’s where the comparison should end before it gets to the notion that women are closer to chimps.
No, it doesn’t mean that at all. The differences described have absolutely nothing to do with the likelihood of hybridization being possible.
I was responding to the OP and not the linked article to Nature if that helps what I said to make any more sense.
But I’m not sure the Nature article disagrees with what I said. To quote two short bits:
Aren’t they saying the same thing I did? The Y chromosome is free to change because the X chromosome provides the functional genes one needs to survive.
How should one compare genes between species in general? How should one compare genes between just one gender and a different species? Male to male and female to female? If so, then yes, women are genetically closer to chimp females than men are to chimp males, in the sense that we’ve got different/more/less (IDK) broken genes on our “deteriorating” Y-chromosome than chimps.
I thought it was relatively simple to determine genetic similarities between species and quantify them. Surely it would be just as simple to include sexes in the comparisons?
Is it really this debatable? I get the sense some posters are preparing their defences against misogyny.
Well, I would have but it turned out that we’d diverged a little too much. Maybe if we’d both been female…
I first encountered this in a book by Dennett or someone like that. It was raised to show that you have to be careful when you talk about percent gene similarity.
Because, clearly, men are more like apes than they are like women. I mean, c’mon, really. Everybody knows!
It’s not at all easy to quantify genetic similarities. There are many kinds of genetic differences, including point mutations (which can “silent” mutations with no effect on protein coding; or be on non-coding bits of DNA; or be to functional genes), translocations, inversions, deletions, duplications, and chromosome fusions or splits. It’s a question as to how these different kinds of mutations should be weighted in calculating similarities.
