    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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