The demise of the y chromosome

Professor Sykes:
Well I think, and even though I'm a man, that men have had it their own way in many ways for several thousand years. Their molecular genetic basis is really actually quite weak and it's going to go. And you can tell that not just by looking at the DNA, but also male infertility is on the increase and we now know that by many examples of male infertility, funnily enough 7% of males are infertile now, many cases of male infertility are due to mutations, new mutations, that are cropping up in the y chromosome. If this carries on then I've estimated that within about between 100 and 200 thousand years, all the y chromosomes that we have now will have gone.

So there we're faced with, well you might think "well great, we're going to have a world populated by women", well we're not because men are still needed to carry on the species but actually as I explore right at the end of Adam's curse, I'm not so sure that men need even to be kept around for that. And when you come down to it, all men actually do, males I should say, not just men, from a genetic point of view is to fertilise eggs with sperm. And actually what men spend most of their time doing is trying to persuade women, the bearer of eggs, to accept their sperm but that's another story.

So this DNA that's come from sperm, it just contains a set of chromosomes that can actually equally well come from another egg. And so I think it's conceivable, and not too far in the future, that you will have children, they will be girls of course, that will have two mothers as parents. And in that way you can continue the species with no need for men at all and so it's something to think about, what would that world be like. I think it would be more peaceful personally but then, I don't know. Everyone has more opinions, my son who is sitting here, Richard, Richard says oh it will be a lot pinker.