Your dad may have given you a lot of things: a love of Bond movies, his old jazz LPs, male pattern baldness. But whatever your inheritance, all dads pass one thing along to their sons—their Y chromosomes. Smaller and stumpier than the X chromosomes shared by men and women, the Y has been passed along through generations of male mammals for millions of years. But because it has only a few hundred genes versus the X’s thousands, geneticists long thought that the Y was wasting away, becoming the wisdom teeth of the genome. More recent research suggests that the Y chromosome is actually a hotbed of evolution. We know that we share 98% of our DNA with our closest primate cousins, chimpanzees, but researchers have found a 30% difference in Y chromosome genetic material between chimp and human dudes. This surprising finding suggests that Y chromosomes hold more mysteries for geneticists. Who knows—they might even hold the key to dads’ groan-worthy sense of humor.
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