# Stephen F. Jones

- Quotes: 5
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-f-jones

## Books

- [Y: The Descent Of Men](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-f-jones/y-the-descent-of-men.md) — 3 quotes

## Recently added quotes

> Few chemicals confer maleness, but many take it away. Which, if any, are responsible for our own troubles is hard to say.The Pill changed men's lives in more ways than one. It caused re-productive hormones to leak into tap water and has been blamed both for the sex changes in freshwater fish and for the drop in our own sperm count. The jury is still out on the issue, but other hormones have had a disastrous effect. A drug called diethylstilbestrol was once thought-in error to prevent miscarriage. Five million mothers took it, and for a time it was even used as a chicken food supplement. A third of the boys exposed to the drug in the womb suffer from small testes or a reduced penis. In rats, the chemical causes prostate and testicular cancer (although there is as yet no sign of those problems in ourselves).To give a powerful steroid to pregnant women was at best unwise, but the effects of other compounds were harder to foresee. The 1950s saw a wonderful new chemical treatment for banana pests. Soon the novel insecticide was much used. Twenty years later the workers noticed something odd: they had almost no children. Their sperm count had dropped by five hundred times.

p. 215 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/steve-jones/y-the-descent-of-men/few-chemicals-confer.md)

> Finland — a country that is a dilute solution of land in water.

p. 261 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/steve-jones/darwins-ghost/finland-a-country.md)

> Freud's antique notion of women as diminished men is quite wrong. Biology instead reveals every man's battle to escape the woman within.

p. 47 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/steve-jones/y-the-descent-of-men/freuds-antique-notion.md)

> Too often, the notion of progress is used as a code word for perfection, the chain of being in a different guise. The term should be employed with caution. Some see an arrow of time in biology, as in physics, but in the opposite direction — a relentless tendency to improve, just as the universe has a built-in trend toward chaos and disorder. That is too optimistic. Some lineages get more complicated, some simpler, and much of life has to struggle to stay in the same place. If everyone is evolving, nobody can afford to stop, and there may be constant change with no overall advance at all.

p. 230 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/steve-jones/darwins-ghost/too-often-the.md)

> Life managed without males for its first billion years, much of which was passed as single cells in a series of warm ponds. Then, in some ancient and neutral Eden, the fruit of the tree of sexual knowledge — a new mutation — persuaded members of a particular clone to fuse with cells from another, and then to divide. That ingenious idea is good news for the novel gene, as it doubles its rate of spread, but is a lot less so for those who receive it, who are obliged to copy the extra DNA. At once, two factions emerge, one keen to force itself upon the other. Thus was sex invented.Soon one contestant began to cheat. Large cells are expensive, but are better at dividing because they have more food reserves. Small cells are cheaper to make, but cannot afford to split. Their sole chance of success hence lies in fusion with a large cell. The first males had appeared on the scene.

p. 19 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/steve-jones/y-the-descent-of-men/life-managed-without.md)