Dwarkesh (host)

So there's at least two niches.

One is pass on the mitochondria.

One is don't pass on the mitochondria.

So once you've established those two, then you can ask the question, why aren't there more than two sexes?

Yeah.

And then you can just say, well, there would just be a repetitive one of these two.

We've been to some college campuses today, you know.

We're probably getting some portion of that.

You have this really interesting discussion about how this not only explains why there's two sexes, but the particular differences in why eggs and sperm develop the way they do, why there's different amounts of replications before they are mature, etc.

I wonder if we can recapitulate that.

Okay, so let's talk about the Y chromosome, which is also not recombined.

Now, just the same way that female egg cells

try to minimize the amount of duplications in order to preserve the quality of the mitochondrial DNA and prevent errors.

Why doesn't the same thing happen with the Y chromosome?

Shouldn't all this sperm duplication be resulting in all kinds of errors in the Y chromosome?

I'm going to read the title.

Is this a woman live longer?

Suppose that evolution on humans just continued naturally for the next billion years, and we didn't have AGI and human gene editing, etc.,

Is the equilibrium that you'd anticipate, that the Y chromosome would then just fade away altogether and there'd be some other way of determining sex and sex-dependent characteristics?

I mean, it's quite interesting because you were saying that the same thing happened to the mitochondrial DNA.