What with the society telling me over and over again that my sexual behavior is unnatural, I developed an inclination toward studying nature. As a student I thought I could pursue the desire – thoroughly boosted by the discovery that prehistoric insects trapped inside amber could lead to the cloning of dinosaurs – as a formal course. I wanted to be a genetic engineer.
But then math got in the way. No way I could stand in front of eminent scientists, George Bush, and Pope Benedict XVI, show them the cloned baby, and declare, “Jesus is back,” if I don’t know how to multiply fractions or if I panic at the sight of mathematical symbols.
So I became a “nature enthusiast” instead, which really is an excuse of sorts. I am a yoga enthusiast and not a yogi because I fall asleep while meditating. I can theoretically become a basketball enthusiast but never a basketball player because I lack the height. So there you go, the origin of a nature enthusiast.
So here’s my confession as a nature enthusiast. After climate change, my next nature obsession is the discovery by scientists that the Y chromosome is shrinking. Others actually estimate that it could totally disappear in 125,000 years. What this means is that men could vanish, replaced by asexual, all-female humans.
Nature has proven that this is possible. Among whiptail lizards, there are asexual females that could reproduce on their own. They reproduce eggs that develop even without the help of male lizards. (Click here to read more about parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction).
A brief explanation: Each human cell has 23 chromosomes, twenty-two of which have pairs. The 23rd is different – it spells the difference between males and females. The 23rd for females is a pair of X chromosomes. For males, it is a pair of an X chromosome and a Y chromosome.
Well, the Y chromosome is smaller compared to the X chromosome, and its size continues to decline. It is different and important because it contains the necessary genetic material to produce sperm and to form the testes. In short, that sperm that we have taught you to contain in a condom or sprayed somewhere far from an open wound – and yes, the same sperm most of us have actually tasted – has been genetically brought to you by the Y chromosome.
As we evolve, mutation takes place in the genetic sequence of the Y chromosome. Because other chromosomes have their alter ego, any mutation could be corrected by the other pair. But since the Y chromosome has no pair, it has been discarding ‘damaged’ genes. The theory is that the X chromosome and the Y chromosome began stated with about 1000 genes. Now, compared to the X chromosome, the Y chromosome has 80 genes only.
Alarm bells ringing? Don’t expect Al Gore to put this is in his powerpoint presentation, but this seems to be the genetic equivalent of the melting polar caps.
There’s an opposing view, though, a recent discovery that claims that the Y chromosome is in for the long haul. Scientists in MIT led by David Page discovered that while the Y chromosome is losing its genes, it is creating a genetic back-up. The genetic sequences that they mapped out were “repeated almost perfectly, forward and backward in palindrome fashion.” Which means that even if unpaired and diminishing, the Y chromosome would survive.
But let’s discard that discovery for the moment and absorb the full implication of the possibility that the Y chromosome would truly, fully disappear: no Y chromosome, no men. No men means the total obliteration of the gay community.
Imagine the scenario that this would create. The transition from sexual reproduction to asexual reproduction would be disastrous, a return to the barbarian era. Stiffer competition within the gay community, eruption of catfights of nuclear proportion between gay men and women. Women reproducing on their own is a lesbian paradise, but it spells chaos for gay men.
Our policies and our moral codes would no longer work, but their path to irrelevance would be a vision from Nostradamus. Imagine what would happen if snapping becomes the main expression of asexual reproduction, bumping off sinful sex. Would snapping be equally regulated? The banner story a hundred thousand years from now – “SNAPPING IS A SIN”, “WOMAN NABBED AFTER SNAPPING IN PUBLIC” or “CONGRESS PASSES MANDATORY WEARING OF GLOVES IN PUBLIC.”
Worse, and perhaps a much nearer scenario, gay men could be blamed for the shrinking of the Y chromosome. Gay sex could be held responsible for the disappearance of the male species, we could be accused of eating each other out.
As an obsession, the idea has caused sleeplessness on my part. In light of the possibility of an all-female unisex society, I decided to stop my quest for immortality. Buddhism is out, and reincarnation is suddenly an inhumane thought. Straight or not, I don’t want to be the last man standing.
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ang tarush
i just happened by your downelink profile and, after a few clicks, here i am. this was a very well-written entry. thanks and congrats! i’ve always thought that a blog was useless if it did not have substance, style, or humor. your writing–happily–has a bit of everything.
i’m a biologist by profession so my first instinct was to google scholar this and read the primary papers. except that laziness suddenly took over. haha!
i did find out from some recent (?) literature that sperm contributes half the genetic material in a fertilized egg… and then some. apparently, our wiggly friends also hold some very significant, albeit transient, information (in the form of molecules called RNA) that may tell the fertilized egg how to develop. this tells me that nature will not so easily dispose of males. and just parthenogenesis will not contribute to jazzing up the gene pool–evolutionarily undesirable.
but i may be wrong, and the Revelations-esque picture you painted may come true in the end. fire raining down from the skies i can handle; a man-less world i cannot.
hopefully, i will be dead by then. if not i’ll be sure to keep a shot of arsenic within easy reach.
I have already read the article about the shrinking/vanishing Y-chromosome a few months ago and the topic is actually old news. Though I can’t remember anything about it stating that the product of the mutation are parthenogetic asexual females. As far as I know the animals involved (I think that they are rats) do still have morphological & sexual males. The only difference is that they no longer possess the y-chromosome but are still functional males. It seems that they had adapted other means of gender differentiation in the absence of the y-chromosome.