Sex, genes and chromosomes: Their discovery, function and evolution

Discoveries in biological systems are fraught with surprises, exceptions, dead ends, and false starts. Reproduction and sexual determination at first seem like simple, straightforward scientific disciplines. This book proves the abject fallacy of that notion in a broad, wide-ranging narrative of the breadth, variation, and detail of the field’s development over 60 yrs of the author’s stellar career. In the 1960s, we knew about the XX karyotype’s predilection for female development in most species and the XY karyotype’s predilection for male development. The discovery of XO females (Turner’s syndrome) and XXY males (Klinefelter’s syndrome), plus scores of reproductive genetic disorders, and the descriptions of X-inactivation and dosage compensation laid the groundwork for countless questions and detailed gene discoveries that, among vertebrate taxa, offered a rich story of cause, regulation, and expression of a panoply of genetic characters. Graves brilliantly describes that history, the puzzling questions, the inferences from studying patterns of sex related phenotypes in weird species across evolution, and the remarkable inference originally influenced by cytogenetics, gene mapping, molecular biology, and genome sequence analyses spanning 450 million yrs of vertebrate evolution. I am not aware of any developmental process where we now understand so much as is described here. We learn of the maintenance, adaptation, and stability of sex determination across the fits and starts of a process to modify and adapt for reproductive balance and success. She employs the power and inference of comparative genetics, molecular biology, experimental design, and genome sequence mining aimed precisely at the genetic basis of sex determination, sperm and egg development, and secondary hormone-mediated regulation.