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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100113/ap_on_sc/us_sci_evolving_men
Notice the end of the address up there. Notice the title of the article when you get there. Notice that the press report doesn't say what the title says. Notice the fifth paragraph which is the only thing vaguely related to the word "debate" in the title.
Now the original article is in the journal Nature and is only available on line for a fee and is full of techno-babble. But I can tell you that the study only compared chimp Y chromosomes to human Y chromosomes. Yes, the difference is dramatic. But, there is no way of knowing from just this what genetic changes occurred solely in the human male and what changed in the chimp male. There is from this study alone no way of knowing what the genetic changes resulted in. There is, most importantly, no way of knowing if any of the changes on this one chromosome were in any way beneficial to chimp or man. The scientists in the study all know these things. The reporter Borenstein does a fairly good job. But in paragraph five he is mostly concerned that people get the wrong idea and think men are more evolved in a qualitative sense than women without bothering with the explanation or caveats. This might well leave people of a particular mindset thinking incorrectly that perhaps the female lead author of the original is just a knee-jerk feminist. Then the editor at Yahoo decides to stir up a *debate* out of thin air. Sheesh!
Notice the end of the address up there. Notice the title of the article when you get there. Notice that the press report doesn't say what the title says. Notice the fifth paragraph which is the only thing vaguely related to the word "debate" in the title.
Now the original article is in the journal Nature and is only available on line for a fee and is full of techno-babble. But I can tell you that the study only compared chimp Y chromosomes to human Y chromosomes. Yes, the difference is dramatic. But, there is no way of knowing from just this what genetic changes occurred solely in the human male and what changed in the chimp male. There is from this study alone no way of knowing what the genetic changes resulted in. There is, most importantly, no way of knowing if any of the changes on this one chromosome were in any way beneficial to chimp or man. The scientists in the study all know these things. The reporter Borenstein does a fairly good job. But in paragraph five he is mostly concerned that people get the wrong idea and think men are more evolved in a qualitative sense than women without bothering with the explanation or caveats. This might well leave people of a particular mindset thinking incorrectly that perhaps the female lead author of the original is just a knee-jerk feminist. Then the editor at Yahoo decides to stir up a *debate* out of thin air. Sheesh!