Males to become extinct???

Interesting title, isn't it?

But first...where have I been? Yes it's been a LONG time - almost 2 months - since I last posted. I have had good intentions but either lacked inspiration or time: there was a trip to Washington, D.C. and with May bringing about the end of the school year, there is much work to be done. And there was also an AP U.S. History exam. But I'm back now, so here goes:

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I first heard about the topic in the title last weekend (and intended to write about it then, but never got around to it) when my parents showed me an article in a newspaper. It talked about how an Oxford Professor, Bryan Sykes, expects male humans to die out in as little as 125,000 years because of the degeneration of the Y chromosome.

My initial reaction was complete disbelief, because wouldn't the extinction of males imply the end of reproduction and therefore extinction of the species? Unless two females could produce an offspring? Or there were asexual reproduction? But shouldn't evolution progress forwards and not backwards - as in, sexual reproduction is more advanced than asexual reproduction, so if we went backwards wouldn't that be illogical? I also questioned the time period that he proposed, because 125,000 years in the scheme of evolution seemes way too short for an entire gender to die out just like that.

Anyway, I found the article online, here. The article also talks about a bill in the UK, and its implications on the lesbian community, but the middle section is the part that interested me the most.

Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University and author of the book Adam’s Curse, is convinced that men will die out as the Y chromosome withers. He has calculated that, at the current rate of decline, heterosexual reproduction may only last around 125,000 years. “The core sex is female,” he says. “Male infertility is high because genes on the Y chromosome are packing up all the time. Many species become extinct because their Y chromosomes apparently disintegrate. In the end, the same thing will probably lead to the extinction of the male gender.”

The only glimmer of hope, he believes, may lie in the experience of the mole vole. This tiny rodent native to the Caucasus mountains of central Asia seems to have lost its Y chromosome somewhere down the evolutionary millennia, but the genetic material that confers maleness has nimbly transferred itself to another chromosome. If the Y chromosome turns out to be as useless as Sykes suggests, it would be possible to move the human SRY (the sex-determining region of the Y chromosome) and associated “maleness” genes to another chromosome and produce males with two X chromosomes.

It also talks about advancements in technology that would indeed enable two females to reproduce; sperm could also possibly be manufactured in labs from other DNA.
Anyway, just very interesting.

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An added bonus:

A schoolmate and friend brought this to my attention - if you like food (all of you probably), and if you like food of the inexpensive variety, you might like CheapEats. It's a guidebook to cheap food (no surprise there). There's a book each about several Canadian cities, like Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. It lists 365 restaurants where breakfast is <$5, lunch <$10 and dinner <$15. The bonus part is that there's a sale on it right now so you can get it for under $10 including taxes and S/H (in Canada only, though). When it asks if you have a coupon code (that's step 2), type in "facebook", and don't forget to press "apply". Being a Torontonian I got the Toronto version, of course, but I'm not sure if the code works for other cities as well - I guess it doesn't hurt to try.

Oh, and hurray for PayPal :)



That's all for now,
Cindy