17
kick
s the male defensive system into higher gear is the elimination of
maleness.
Expendability is built into the very genes of males.  Kirby Smith
of Johns Hopkins University studied four generations of an Amish
family whose perfectly average menfolk were missing one small thing.
An entire arm of their male gene (the Y gene) was gone.  These Amish
should have thanked their lucky stars that they were bereft of this
particular chunk of masculine materiel.  When researcher Smith
compared the family with the truncated gene to others in the
neighborhood, he came up with an astounding result.  Among the
normal Amish of the vicinity, men died around the age of 70.  In the
genetically-impaired family, on the other hand, gentlemen carried on
to the ripe old age of 82.3.  They lived over twelve years longer than the
folks down the road because they were freed from a microscopic piece
of poison: an arm of the normal male gene.
One result of these myriad handicaps: in every industrialized
country, women live four to ten years longer than men.21
But why does nature treat the lives of males with such abandon?
Her reasons are simple.  If you did away with the vast majority of men
on the planet but preserved the women, you would scarcely even dent
our species' reproductive capabilities.  One man kept around as a stud
could easily provide a hundred women with the wherewithal to
become pregnant whenever they pleased.  Every nine months a
one-man, one-hundred-woman collective could produce a hundred
babies.
The lives of women, on the other hand, cannot be so casually
disposed of.  Pare humanity down to one woman for every hundred
men, and you'll have one hundred very horny and bellicose guys
slicing each other to ribbons or slashing themselves in despair.  What's
worse, you'll cut the number of possible babies down from one
hundred every nine months to one.  You'll doom the human race to
extinction.
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