Nick Lane

She worked on these kind of questions.

And she saw the growth rate as a common denominator.

The Y chromosome is basically saying grow fast.

Why would he grow fast?

Well, in part, you can grow fast.

You don't have any constraints on trashing your own mitochondria.

Because you're not passing them on.

So you can grow fast and be an advantage to growing fast.

If you're a male, you're going to get the resources.

You grow faster.

If you're a female, you don't want to grow so fast because you need to effectively cordon off your germline to preserve the oocytes for the next generation.

And until you've done that, you don't want to trash your mitochondria.

So you've got a delay phase before you can start growing fast.

Ursula Mitvoeck argued that that was exactly the case.

We don't know for a fact that that's true, but it's quite common that females live longer than males, not just in humans, but in Drosophila as well, they do, usually.

Well, there are, and it has disappeared altogether in some species.

And usually what you retain is one gene, which causes a different rate of growth.

So really, the Y chromosome, yes, it's degenerate.

It's lost most of its genes.

The thing about Mueller's ratchet, which is the degradation of things when you don't have sex or you don't have any recombination, there's two factors that influence it.