Men on the endangered list?

[Repugnant Abomination]

Bad news: men doomed

Good news: no problem

Brendan Bourne

A WORLD free from war and tyranny is at hand. Men are doomed to extinction and women will rule the planet supreme.

So says Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, in a book that envisages the "Sapphic reproduction" of women by genetic manipulation.

Sykes contends that a world without men is the logical consequence of the decaying human Y-chromosome, the only piece of DNA that men possess and women do not.

A "genetic ruin littered with molecular damage", the Y-chromosome cannot repair ; itself nor arrest the steadily accumulating damage, he reports bleakly in Adam's Curse.

"Like the face of the moon, still pitted by all the craters from all the meteors that have ever fallen onto its surface, Y-chromosomes cannot heal their own scars. It is a dying chromosome and one day it a will become extinct."

So far, so bad. The decline of the Y-chromosome has been well chronicled by scientists. What is new is Sykes's description of the implications and the stark choices to be faced by the human race.

Sykes is a leading authority on DNA who traced all humans through female genes to a few ancestral women living thousands of years ago. He says that because the Y-chromosome's main function is switching on male embryos in the womb, its demise spells curtains for men. By his estimate, the male of the species will go belly-up in about 125,000 years.

What seems like an eternity is, of course, only a blink of geological time. There are urgent matters to consider. Sykes voices the most burning one: "Do we need men? Can we do without them?"

He cautions ultra-feminists against rejoicing too soon. "Destroying the male sex would be a very short-lived victory. Men are still required for breeding, if nothing else."

But not for much longer, it seems, if Sykes's radical solution is adopted — abandon men altogether. Chillingly, he states: "From the genetic point of view, very little stands in its way."

His strategy for perpetuating a new female race, free of their aggressive mates, depends on tweaking the proven technique of injecting sperm into eggs. Instead, the nucleus from a second egg would be injected.

With present technology, the embryo would not develop normally, he admits. "But it is short-sighted to say that it is fundamentally impossible."

However, assuming this glitch is overcome, the only difference from any other birth would be that the baby would always be a girl. "The entire process has been accomplished without sperm, without Y-chromosomes and without men," Sykes exults.

Importantly, the girls would not be clones, but comprise the same mixture of their parents' genes, shuffled by recombination, as today's children. But there would be one other difference: both parents would be women.

"Lesbian couples already enlist the help of' a man to donate his set of chromosomes to fertilize the eggs of one of them. At some point these couples will want to have a baby to whom both, rather than just one of them, are parents."

It is almost bound to happen, says Sykes, who can find no moral objection. "Men are now on notice," he states.

The professor does not venture what would pass for sex once men disappeared entirely. All reproduction would need to be assisted genetically.
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An article that disagrees!
NEW YORK (AP) -- The human Y chromosome -- the DNA chunk that makes a man a man -- has lost so many genes over evolutionary time that some scientists have suspected it might disappear in 10 million years. But a new study says it'll stick around.

Researchers found no sign of gene loss over the past 6 million years, suggesting the chromosome is “doing a pretty good job of maintaining itself,” said researcher David Page of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.

That agrees with prior mathematical calculations that suggested the rate of gene loss would slow as the chromosome evolved, Page and study co-authors note in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. And, they say, it clashes with what Page called the “imminent demise” idea that says the Y chromosome is doomed to extinction.

The Y appeared 300 million years ago and has since eroded into a dinky chromosome, because it lacks the mechanism other chromosomes have to get rid of damaged DNA. So mutations have disabled hundreds of its original genes, causing them to be shed as useless. The Y now contains only 27 genes or families of virtually identical genes.

In 2003, Page reported that the modern-day Y has an unusual mechanism to fix about half of its genes and protect them from disappearing. But he said some scientists disagreed with his conclusion. The new paper focuses on a region of the Y chromosome where genes can't be fixed that way.

Researchers compared the human and chimpanzee versions of this region. Humans and chimps have been evolving separately for about 6 million years, so scientists reasoned that the comparisons would reveal genes that have become disabled in one species or the other during that time.

They found five such genes on the chimp chromosome but none on the human chromosome, an imbalance Page called surprising.

“It looks like there has been little if any gene loss in our own species lineage in the last 6 million years,” Page said.

That contradicts the idea that the human Y chromosome has continued to lose genes so fast it'll disappear in 10 million years, he said.

“I think we can with confidence dismiss .... the 'imminent demise' theory,” Page said.

Jennifer A. Marshall Graves of the Australian National University in Canberra, a gene researcher who argues for eventual extinction of the Y chromosome, called Page's work “beautiful” but said it didn't shake her conviction that the Y is doomed.

The only real question is when, not if, the Y chromosome disappears, she said. “It could be a lot shorter than 10 million years, but it could be a lot longer,” she said.

The Y chromosome has already disappeared in some other animals and “there's no reason to expect it can't happen to humans,” she said. If it happened in people, some other chromosome would probably take over the sex-determining role of the Y, she said.
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Thoughts?

[ October 19, 2005, 02:52 AM: Message edited by: Repugnant Abomination ]

[ninjaface]

This is interesting because there is a species of lizard that is comprised of 100% females. The males are extinct. Somehow, 2 lesbo lizards get together and simulate straight sex without the use of some kind of a rudimentary lesbian lizard strap-on apparatus and the eggs just seem to develop.

I guess I'm gonna have myself frozen so they can thaw me out in 125,000 years. I'd be willing to take one for the team, carry on the male race as we know it. On the plus side, I could afford to be extremely picky and still get to bang a lot of chicks. That would rock.

[ October 19, 2005, 02:43 AM: Message edited by: ninjaface ]

[Ironic Mustache]

You'd have some badass 3, 4, 5 hell maybe even 10-ways.