Save the Male
“Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, has caused a stir with his book Adam’s Curse: A Future Without Men… Professor Sykes said the male of the species would only last for another 5000 generations before dwindling fertility and a decrepit Y-chromosome consigned him to the history books along with neanderthals and trilobites… The Y-chromosome, which carries the genetic switch to turn babies into boys at six weeks of gestation, is doomed, Professor Sykes argues. ‘The Y chromosome is a genetic ruin, littered with molecular wreckage… a graveyard of rotting genes,’ he writes. ‘It is a dying chromosome and one day it will become extinct.’” — News.com.au (Australia)
What will happen to men when they become an endangered species? You can imagine it playing out one of two ways. On one hand, scarcity might inflame demand. Men might become such rarities that they would be treasured simply for their maleness. The ugliest, hairiest, skankiest dude would get hot chicks just because he lived in a world where there was only one man for every million women. Starlets and models would beg for cups of his semen and his penis would be venerated like a holy relic. People would want to touch it because, well, they might not have the opportunity much longer. The penis would be going the way of the dinosaur, and future generations might only know of its existence by the fossil imprints it leaves in love dolls and pocket pussies…
On the other hand, society might meet the lack of maleness with all kinds of innovations in reproduction technology. There are already so many ways to aid and abet the process of reproduction scientifically that men per se might well become superfluous. And in such a case, they would no doubt be the scorn of society. Women would be technological Amazons, superwomen living in a lesbian utopia, and they would look with contempt at those genetic wrecks, men. They would shudder with disgust at the thought of the decrepit DNA emitted by so many vestigial penises, the same as a young girl might feel repulsed at the thought of sleeping with a broken-down old man. Who, after all, wants to have sex with anybody who already has one foot in the grave? If men are to become “graveyards of rotting genes,” the only women they’ll appeal to will be necrophiles hot for obsolete nucleic acids.
Its a thought.
This is just a baseless theory from a geneticist using more sociology & politics than evidence.
Female genes are more stable because of the XX configuration rather than the mixed XY in males. Males are more prone to mutations due to this lack of redundency. While some mutations end a species most of them will simply contribute to sub-species over time. Of which a new species may come about in addition to or in place of the original. Mutation is required in the process called evolution.
A general concensus was reached that moving from unisexual to bisexual (reproductive, not sexual perference) was nessesary to promote rapid adaptiblity through selection of preferable traits. Differing traits are produced via mutation, the trait may become wide spread if it provides an advantage and is there for valued by females able to breed.
Basicly that would mean males came about so changes could advance at a faster rate and the process of positive to negative trait selection would be improved. There by enabling the large neocortex advantage we humans have over the rest of the kindom animalia at this point. The structure of the Y chromosome has such a state as it needs to, in order to serve as a functional contrast to X.
I’ve known too many professors that cannot supply a logical construct able to defend against or incorporate challanges to it’s principles.
If the male sex is in a state of decline perhaps a technologically advanced Amazon society is not such a bad idea. As you know the mythical Amazons did not eliminate men. They simply kept them as slaves. Males often place themselves at genetic risk by greater occupational exposure to toxic chemicals and stressful work environments that may cause deliterious changes to their genes. It would be logical to remove them from these environmental stresses to slow down or even halt the progressive degradation of the y chromosome. The most dangerous and toxic occupation, that of a soldier, would obviously have to be eliminated entirely. Obviously men would not do this willingly. But women control the male sex for the first years of their lives. Perhaps they could halt the growth of a male child at the barest onset of puberty, allowing sexual maturation but halting all the risk taking agressive tendencies of the ‘big strong male’ that we all see so graphically demonstrated in the daily news. The smaller, less aggressive males could be relegated to less genetically risky occupations such as childcare, sewing, and housekeeping, perhaps being kept as ‘property’ by their mothers until an appropriate ‘mistress’ is found for them. In essence a return to the traditional gender inequality of the past, but with the female gender in the driver’s seat this time. It may not be so bad for the little males.
This idea isn’t as outlandish as it sounds since I believe that Bonobos, the African Pygmy Chimpanzees, have a similar social organization.
Every so often some random comes up with some bogus theory that the Y chromosome is dying and will become extinct, completely incapable of realising the Y chromosome does not define a man. That job falls to a single gene on the Y chromosome which is always conserved – the SRY gene. This stimulates the production of testes-promoting factor which halts development of ovaries and triggers the development of the sex organs into the male configuration.
The Y chromosome isn’t even needed – just that single gene. There exist XX males where the SRY gene has been swapped onto the X chromosome, and they are as masculine as the rest of us – why should these men not be the males of the future, leaving we XY males to die off? Why could maleness not change its form somehow so maleness is defined by lack of a companion chromosome for the X? This is, if I recall, the system used in some animals – one X chromosome makes a man, two makes a woman. Birds, on the other hand, have a different setup – ZZ makes a male, ZW makes a female. Why can human biology not change in an unexpected fashion? Furthermore, why should it change at all? What’s stopping the Y chromosome from existing but being completely redundant, all functions taken over by the X?
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