SCIENCE: Sometimes it's hard to be a woman, as Tammy Wynette sang. But the study of genetics suggests that, as a rule, it's harder not to be. Humans all start out female. And when half of us turn male, a month after conception, it's the work of a mere 50 genes - one in every thousand. So as Steve Jones writes, everybody from the author of the Book of Genesis to Freud was wrong.
Y: The Descent of Men by Steve Jones. Little Brown, pp 280 . £14.99
Far from women being diminished men, biology "reveals instead every man's battle to escape the woman within".
The escape attempt, even where successful, is hazardous. From baldness to premature death, those of us on the run from femininity pay a high price. The obvious advantages in reproduction are offset by the stress involved in sex for males of all species, a factor on which wildlife programmes depend for much of their entertainment value.
And while few life-forms are as dangerous for males as the duck-billed platypus (from an even start, males are gradually outnumbered six to one because so many are killed by rivals) human maleness carries a heavy tax too. It could hardly be otherwise when you consider - and Jones considers it at length, in examples even more likely to put female readers off breakfast - that each time a man ejaculates, he produces enough sperm to fertilise every woman in Europe.
Testosterone is blamed for many things, with little evidence. But insofar as it stimulates aggression while suppressing the immune system, its fingerprints are all over the scene of the average man's premature demise. Other than suicide (itself a modern male plague), violent death is twice as likely for boys as girls, and the statistical difference is large even in four-year-olds. At the other end of the age spectrum, the figures are even more damning, as Jones illustrates with one striking example.
In a chapter that makes painful reading, he discusses the history of male mutilation, from circumcision to orchidectomy. A nice word for castration, orchidectomy was named after a likeness between testes and orchid bulbs, and such deflowering has gone on for millennia, for widely varying reasons.
African bushmen bit off a son's right testicle to make him a better hunter. The Vatican once approved of the removal of both to preserve high singing voices so that, as taught by St Paul, women could remain silent in church. But the procedure was also used in the US in the 1930s, as a punishment; and a study 40 years later showed that the unfortunates so amended lived an average 13 years longer than those intact.
Despite such benefits, orchidectomy has fallen out of fashion. But as Jones explains, men are being phased out anyway. While his book is primarily an updating homage to his hero Darwin's The Descent of Man, it was also written in the long and woolly shadow of Dolly the Sheep.
Dolly's fatherless conception hints at nature's return to its original, feminine state. Such a future has inspired more imaginative works - Michel Houellebecq's Atomised among them. But even if the cloning revolution doesn't do for the male, Jones implies, evolution will. The Y chromosome, already much reduced from its heyday, is withering on the vine and unlikely to last more than another 10 million years.
Over such a time-scale, of course, predictions are meaningless. Especially since the great success of the male, and of sex in general, has been to facilitate the mixing of genes, without which evolution could hardly happen. Males may might yet mutate themselves out of a corner, the author concedes.
So the book does not quite prove the old line that when God created man she was only joking. What it does, in Jones's sharply written and witty deconstruction, is explain the reasons, many of them social, for the great decline in male confidence since Darwin; who was able to claim that the law of equal transmission of genetic material had spared the female of the species even greater inferiority. "Otherwise," as he wrote, "man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen".
Frank McNally is an Irish Times reporter and columnist