Is the end nigh for males?

There is a recent report of a new stem-cell study from the University of Gottingen in Germany where stem cells taken from men's bone marrow have been redirected to resemble immature sperm cells. The next step, of course, is to create mature sperm cells in the laboratory, without the need for testicles. Professor Karim Nayernia led the study and he has previously managed to grow sperm cells from mouse bone marrow and used them to fertilize mouse ova and create living baby mice. All this is good news for infertile men - in fact, the purpose of these studies is to help infertile couples to conceive. But this news has also been seized by the sensationalist world media, and it has been speculated that, in the future, men may become superfluous as sperm will be produced from female bone marrow stem cells.

Imagine: no more men in the world ... some might say it would be a utopia. It conjures up images similar to that depicted by the 1915 story "Herland" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story can be found in its entirety HERE. Herland is about a secluded civilization that is populated only by women (all men had been killed long ago by a series of wars and natural disasters). The inhabitants of Herland use a technique called "parthenogenisis" (which is never explained in detail) to procreate. In this story, Gilman shows that our society is unfair to women and does not allow them to achieve their full potential. The women of Herland are strong, self-confident, self-reliant and very intelligent; their society is peaceful, orderly and crime-free. Herland is basically a giant family pursuing the common good. Accoerding to Ms. Gilman, this kind of utopia is possible when men are eliminated.

Herland is fiction, and we humans still do not have any way to procreate without sex, but we do have the technology today to predetermine the sex of our progeny - although we still need males to make it possible. In dairy farms around the world, cows are much more desirable than bulls; in fact, bulls are a liability and eat into the dairy farmer's profits. However, a technique called "flow cytometry" or "Fluorescent-activated cell sorting" (FACS) is used to separate bulls' female-producing sperm from male-producing sperm. Bull sperm are marked with special dyes that bind to the X or the Y chromosome. The cells are then passed through a FACS machine where the X and Y bearers are separated. The Y bearers are discarded and cows are impregnated with X bearing sperm, thus guaranteeing that a cow will be born. A company in Virginia called Microsort provides the same service to human couples. This process still requires input from men ... so, if Professor Nayernia's research bears no fruit, maybe a super race of feral women could take over the world and enslave only the small group of men needed for the purpose of creating a global sperm bank (all other men would be exterminated).

Would it be desirable for us to engineer an all-woman world where people breed without the benefits (not to mention the pleasure) of sex? Why do we need sex anyway?
By whatever means, Nature has bestowed this very sophisticated system of sex upon us. Men and women have different and complementary characteristics and behaviours ... why would Nature provide such a system and "infrastructure" if it were not of vital importance to our survival? Well, biologically speaking, sex allows species to acquire new characteristics by exchanging genes. Eventually a mutant gene will be exchanged which may confer a new and beneficial characteristic - e.g. resistance to a particular contagion. We need sex in order to evolve and survive - just as all other species, including bacteria and viruses, are constantly mutating. And men are vital to the process. Genetically speaking, men bring women together; they make genetic links between families and allow genes to be tested against nature in new and perhaps beneficial coalitions; sperm are used to move foreign DNA into eggs. We can think of males as conduits through which genetic information passes between females. Without males, all new mutations would be restricted to the direct descendants of the female in which they originate, and humanity would become a multitude of clones. Humanity would certainly become less efficient in its fight for survival. The end of the "male race" is still a long way away.
Scientific arguments notwithstanding, few would disagree that women in general would not like to see a world without men ... we men are such lovable creatures.‎