Men are doomed!

Just imagine a world unencumbered by brutish men and their unpleasant bodily habits. Imagine a world run with quiet efficiency by demure professionals.

Imagine, in brief, a world run entirely by women. Idle fantasy? Not any more, it would seem. It’s what radical feminists have been trying to persuade us for years: man really is the weaker sex. Now science is beginning to support the claim. Indeed, according to one of our top geneticists, men are doomed to disappear off the face of the earth. In their place would rule a biologically- superior race of women, who would reproduce artificially to ensure the survival of the human species.

It won’t happen in our lifetime, of course. But some time in the next 125,000 years, Man, as distinct from Woman, will have belched his last. This is the startling idea put forward in Adam’s Curse, a new book by Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University.

For years, Sykes has been analysing trends in human development and fertility, and come to an alarming conclusion. Men are becoming progressively weaker and weaker. The very material of life that makes men ‘male’ has been eroded over the centuries, to the extent that it will become too weak to play a functioning role in reproduction.

And when this happens, if humans are to survive at all, then women will need to reproduce with each other, in a process which is by no means scientifically impossible.

How could this be? Prof Sykes explains it is all the fault of the piece of DNA which distinguishes the male of the species from the female — namely the Y-chromosome.

Male DNA has the single Y-chromosome, female DNA does not. This accounts for many of the differences between the sexes. Indeed, Prof Sykes asserts that men are, in reality, merely ‘genetically-modified women’.

It is the Y-chromosome that makes men stronger, more aggressive and competitive than women. In that sense, it is to blame for wars, dictatorships, and the cut-throat commercialism of the modern world — not to mention the sport of rugby.
This Y-chromosome determines the sex of a developing embryo through a small constituent part known as the SRY (the Sex-determining Region of the Y chromosome).

This SRY seems to be particularly prevalent in the genetic material of powerful figures: 43 U.S. Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush, have fathered 90 sons and only 63 daughters.

And yet, according to Sykes, the Ychromosome is now a weedy, genetic mess, riddled with damage, decay and mutation. It is, he says, slowly diminishing and ultimately doomed.

The reason is that the Ychromosome is unable to heal itself. Unlike men, women have two strapping X-chromosomes. These can pair up and swop genes to minimise bad mutations. The Y-chromosome of male DNA simply cannot do this.
And hence, natural mutations and damage simply keep accumulating through the generations.

In the face of this decline, the male’s Y-chromosome has no ‘partner’ from which to seek repairs. It is alone, and suffering what Prof Sykes calls ‘death from a thousand cuts’.

The evidence is all around us, and it’s not just the increasing feminisation of men, evolving over time into androgynous figures such as David Beckham. Prof Sykes also cites the increase in male infertility.

Men’s sperm counts have dropped dramatically in the past half-century. Now 7 per cent of men are either infertile or have very low fertility.
And a substantial proportion of infertilities — perhaps affecting one man in 50 — are due to mutations of the Y-chromosome.

In perhaps 125,000 years — the equivalent of a mere 5,000 generations — this problem could see fertility dropping to 1 per cent of its current rate. When this happens, the odds of conceiving a child by natural means will be impossibly small. Most couples will be left with little option but to seek medical intervention.

Yet even current in vitro fertilisation techniques cannot address the fundamental problem.

In most assisted reproduction, sperm is injected right into the egg, so that fertilisation can take place even if that sperm is totally immobile.
But if the infertility is caused by Ychromosome damage, then by assisting conception regardless of the natural fault, the problem is simply being passed to future generations.

Natural selection would no longer be able to discriminate against the faulty mutations to ensure ‘the survival of the fittest’. Thus, over many hundreds of years, the Ychromosomes would shrivel and fail.

So would women then rule the world? Only if they can find another way to reproduce. For without men to breed with, women, of course, would vanish, too. You can’t bear a daughter without a father.

And without men to fertilise women’s eggs, Prof Sykes predicts the entire human race will become extinct in the next 100-200 millennia.

Can science avoid this catastrophe for the species? Perhaps it can. There are two possible solutions.

First, if nature were to find a way to make the decaying Y-chromosome redundant yet still pass on the essential genetic material of male identity, men might have a reprieve.

Evidence that this is possible can be found in an unlikely source of hope for mankind: the mole vole.
The male of Ellobius lutescens, an otherwise unremarkable rodent from the Caucasus foothills, has no Y-chro
mosome, nor SRY. Yet it has escaped the problems that mankind faces by the slow deterioration of the Y-chromosome.
It achieved this by a mutation which means that genes elsewhere in its DNA are able to do the job of male development, without being governed by the Y-chromosome.
This may be only a temporary solution. It is inevitable, says Prof Sykes, that the mole vole chromosome which now dictates sexual selection will itself decay over time.
But it will survive for tens of millions of years longer than it would had it relied solely on the Ychromosome for reproduction. There is, however, a second, more controversial, option to ensure the survival of the human race. And this time, men face the chop.
It is a prospect that would no doubt have delighted radical feminists such as Valerie Solanas, who in 1967 founded SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men) with a manifesto which stated: ‘There remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to
. . . destroy the male sex.’
Could her wildest proposals come true? Yes, says Prof Sykes. Thanks to advances in GM science, men, he warns, ‘are now on notice’.
The new world order would work like this. At present, fertilisation involves the fusion of two sets of genetic material, male and female. But what if that process was to involve, instead, the fusion of genetic material from two women?
Such a prospect is no longer beyond the bounds of scientific possibility. The DNA could be extracted from the nucleus of one woman’s cell, and made to fuse with the DNA inside another woman’s egg to create an embryo.
Because of the absence of the Ychromosome, the resulting baby would always be a girl. Once fullygrown, she would be able to reproduce with another woman using the same ‘artificial’ process.
Is this a lesbian parenting fantasy or a scientific necessity? One thing is certain: if this method of reproduction became the norm, then men would join the Dodo in the glass display cases of the Natural History Museum. But at least the human race would survive.
SO DOES this leave modern man facing genetic redundancy? Not quite yet, it would seem. For among the several theoretical solutions to save men from extinction, Prof Sykes favours the creation of what he calls an ‘Adonis’ chromosome. In effect, this would be a designer chromosome-using a package of genes necessary to make a working man with active sperm. They could be cut out of the wreckage of the dying Y-chromosome, or even replicated from scratch through DNA synthesis, and inserted into another chromosome to create a man.
This sort of genetic engineering has already proved successful in experiments on rodents, in which a fertilised mouse egg, genetically destined to be female, was injected with the mouse equivalent of the SRY gene and born male instead.
Unlike now, a human male given this treatment would have two Xchromosomes and have all the necessary sperm genes, says Prof Sykes. He would be able to father boys and girls. Boys would be produced from the repackaged chromosome, while girls would be produced as normal.
In other words, the ailing human Y-chromosome would be allowed to die off. But man survives in all his bellicose, hairy-limbed glory.
No doubt this all sounds alarming, morally and ethically. GM crops and Dolly the Sheep have already stirred up a worldwide furore over science and technology usurping Nature.
But the Y-chromosome problem is one of the fundamental survival of the species — or at least one half of it. Can we afford to have moral qualms when mankind itself faces extinction? ¦ ADAM’S CURSE by Bryan Sykes (Bantam Press, £18.99).