Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (40 page)

For the first time in the history of life on our planet, evolution may soon begin to be directed by something other than natural selection; reproduction is coming under human control. Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, announced in June 2013 that nuclear transfer had been approved for the United Kingdom and, pending parliamentary debate, might be implemented before the end of 2014. The procedure, which would be offered to couples at risk for a mitochondrial genetic disease, involves taking an egg from a donor, removing its nucleus, replacing that with a fertilized nucleus from the couple, and implanting the new egg in the woman from the couple at risk. It can also be done by transferring an unfertilized nucleus from the woman to the donor’s egg, then fertilizing it with the man’s sperm and implanting it.

Mitochondria are our energy centers, and they have their own genes. But sperm don’t have them, so they are passed down only through women. If a woman has a mutation in her mitochondrial genes, she will pass it on to her children. But if (as in this procedure) her and her husband’s other genes are transferred to another woman’s egg, the donor’s normal mitochondria will be passed on instead. The child will in effect have three genetic parents, a mother and a father, sharing the vast majority of the child’s genes, but also a second, mitochondrial mother.

This is now. Next, consider a modified version of nuclear transfer in which the nucleus is removed from the egg of one woman
(say, in a lesbian couple) and used to fertilize the egg of another. This child would have two mommies, but not just in the sense of the children being brought up by lesbian couples today; she—and the child would always be a she—would have two
biological
mommies.

The end of men?

Well, we can also imagine that the sperm of the two men in a gay couple, one bearing an X chromosome and the other carrying either an X or a Y, have their DNA extracted and used to replace the DNA in a donor egg. The thing is, they need the donor egg. Oh, and by the way: they need a womb.

Surrogacy could become more common and meet this need, but this path can’t lead to the end of women. Eventually, I suppose, we can imagine a completely external human gestation. We are able to keep babies alive from earlier and earlier fetal stages—we’re down to about half of pregnancy—but that’s with a high risk of death and disability. So external gestation is a very long way off, but I suspect that the union of nuclear DNA from two women is at most decades away, and there will be other ways of doing it besides nuclear transfer—for example, by reverse-engineering women’s skin cells to form a germ cell and then an egg and a sperm. So if one sex is going to decide to eliminate the other, women will have a jump on men by at least a couple of centuries. Besides, the decline of males may already be under way.

There are biological and social clues. The Y chromosome has shrunk in size over the eons, although not much in the last 25 million years, and a 2014 study suggests it can’t shrink much further. But human sperm counts have gone down in a time span of decades, and this is likely ongoing. Lionel Tiger’s
The Decline of Males
pointed to this trend in 1999. Research in France has shown a decline of about a third between 1989 and 2005. A Finland study showed a substantial decline, and a Denmark study showed an
increase
in sperm concentration (potentially good for making babies, since the egg is more densely surrounded) but a decrease
in
quality
and likelihood of fertility. A study in India also showed increased concentration but decreased motility. The consensus seems to be that some sort of decline is real, and various proposed causes include hot baths, sedentary lives, tight underpants, fatty foods, maternal smoking, and global warming.

What about other traditional contributions of men, aside from DNA? Men’s physical strength is needed less and less, as manufacturing wanes, robots take over more and more factory tasks, and service economies grow. In less developed countries that have not made this transition, women do hard physical labor, too. In war, the use of drones, bots, and other technologically advanced weapons systems will continue to limit the need for physical strength. In very specific situations—hand-to-hand infantry combat, special forces operations like the one against Osama bin Laden, and carrying people out of burning buildings or off battlefields—muscle matters, but in many situations it no longer does.

Children are certainly learning to see males as dispensable. About 40 percent in the United States are born to unmarried mothers, and many more will spend some time in single-parent households, four out of five headed by women. The percentage of married women who outearn their husbands quadrupled from 6 in 1960 to 24 in 2011, and the graph is a straight line going upward; the statistics are similar for married couples with children under eighteen. As for education, the percentage of couples with children where the wife is more educated than the husband went from 7 to 23 in the same time period, while the percentage where the reverse was true hovered around 16 (in most couples, husband and wife are about equally educated). Given the differing rates of high school and college graduation and the impact of those degrees on earnings, the educational disparity favoring wives over husbands can only increase.

Contrary to some claims, however, there is little evidence that to grow up mentally healthy a child must have a mommy and a daddy
in an uninterrupted stream for eighteen years. Children who have two mothers or two fathers differ only in that they grow up on average less homophobic than conventionally raised kids (although some data suggest that gay fathers are more involved parents). Divorce makes life difficult for some children but saves others, and if they don’t experience (1) a big drop in standard of living, (2) a complete loss of contact with one parent, or (3) continuing open conflict between the parents, they do as well as kids with non-divorced parents, some of whom probably shouldn’t have stayed together. Children of single parents are more disadvantaged, and it’s important for them to have at least one person besides the parent they can relate to and trust, but if they have that, along with a certain amount of resilience, they will do well. So it is likely that in a world of women, where women maintain strong social networks and relationships, children could grow up very nicely, thank you—especially if they are only girls.

But the end of men? Really?

What we are actually talking about is directing evolution, and that will become easier and easier. Evolution, finally, is about changes in genes, and we are steadily taking charge of them.

We saw in
chapter 2
that whiptail lizards evolved all-female species from ancestors that had both sexes. Reproduction in these whiptails preserved the sexual interactions—and most likely the sexual pleasure—of their two-sex condition yet dispensed with males, along with all their baggage. Females take turns having offspring and serving the purpose of stimulating ovulation and triggering development as males once did with their bodies and their sperm. But women might not want to wait a million years. They could instead deploy biological science on behalf of male-free reproduction—slowly enough, perhaps, to accustom themselves to taking pleasure in each other as the males dwindle, partly naturally, partly by design.

Or perhaps they could follow the jacana route, engineering males to be smaller and, with the help of sperm selection, more numerous. This might prevent the downside of jacana females’ lives: fighting viciously and killing one another’s young in order to commandeer scarce males. Men might have to be modified a bit to make them better full-time fathers and prevent them from becoming violent, as surplus males tend to do. Something would have to be done about men’s sex drive; although perhaps women could learn to be happy in a newly polyandrous world, where they need to have sex with numerous men in rotation, to keep the boy-toy harem more or less calm. For this to work, you wouldn’t want to make the men
too
small—although chemical adjustment of women’s sexuality, by women, would by then be quite advanced. Eventually, guided evolution could include external gestation after the first few months of pregnancy. That way, women could reproduce fast enough to keep the pint-sized fathers happy and busy.

Or we could aim for the lemur syndrome: women the same size as men or a little bigger but dominating decisively, the weakest woman feared by the strongest man. Polyamory would be the order of the day, with males still competing for access and females the deciders, but both sexes would get plenty of variety and males would ultimately stay diffident, hopeful, and respectful. This pattern would recover an early era of primate evolution, before monkeys and apes emerged and took new paths, some leading to extreme male domination.

Recall, however, that not all monkeys went that way; for another model we could also turn to our cousins in South America, the marmosets, with their imperfect but stable pair bonds and utterly devoted dads, carrying their twins around all day except when the babies sidle over to Mom to suckle. Sometimes there are two males to a female, sometimes an extra female—it varies; it’s a mellow, share-and-share-alike sort of world. Another century’s humans could learn from them.

In a more distant future, evolution could go much further, as
some species have done, although ours would be under our own—or at least women’s—control. Men reduced to diminutive parasites that sink their teeth into women’s sides and fuse with them, delivering a periodic pulse of sperm? Somehow I don’t see women choosing that, although it does fulfill the age-old romantic goal of two becoming one. As for the black widow or praying mantis solutions, women would have to change their appetites pretty drastically—but culinary fashion does evolve.

Most simple would be the gradual solution. Beginning a few decades from now, with more and more women choosing artificial insemination and single motherhood (or partnerships with other women, sexual or not), they may increasingly choose to have their own eggs fertilized by the DNA from another woman’s egg. This would very slowly increase the numbers of women relative to men, which would be a lot less risky than the excess of men we see in some countries today. In this female-forward world, women would control the hookup culture.

The very slowly shrinking numbers of men should be quite happy being outnumbered, as long as some women still want to have sex with them—and as long as they behave themselves. But over many generations, certainly over evolutionary time scales, we could theoretically see men fully replaced or literally kept in small numbers for sexual services, as well as for heavy lifting and changing lightbulbs on high ceilings. The men, in this future world, could easily be engineered to have broad shoulders, square jaws, sexual prowess, amorous sensitivity, made-to-order intelligence, a sense of humor, or whatever other features women decide on. Women could create the sperm-bank book in advance, then either use the sperm or just use the men. Certainly, they could scientifically limit the men to minimal levels of aggression, arrogance, self-importance, and entitlement. With one man sexually serving several or many women, he will be enjoying life, and they won’t have to have sex with him except when they ring the bell. Or a group of discerning women
could choose to share several men: a beefy blond, a tall, dark, handsome brunet, a weight lifter, a marathoner, an androgynous one for babysitting, a long-haired hunk for wild sex on demand—you get the idea.

I freely admit that these are all bio-fantasies, but some of them, at least, will be possible in the future. Will women want them? A friend who read a draft of this book commented, “As a woman I hate the idea of a manless world, and I think that 98 percent of women would agree.” I hope she’s right, since the end of men would mean the end of billions like me. Men, many women say, do add variety and even excitement to their lives (when we’re not behaving too badly), and
vive la différence
seems to point to a long two-sex future.

Maybe it’s just my male desire to stick around and be a part of it, but I think the most logical route to that future would be to bonobo-ize humanity. We have two closest relatives, it’s true, but this could be our chance to toss out the “battle” part of relations between the sexes—the part we share with chimpanzees: male domination, physical aggression, rape, and murderous men-in-groups-type raids. Instead we could guide our future evolution in the way of our equally close bonobo cousins. This could lead to unshakable female coalitions, based perhaps in part on sex, and males who are not unhappy (males in that female-forward species actually have a great life) but never get out of hand. They don’t just know their place; they make love, not war. It’s not that they’re incapable of aggression; it’s that they keep a lid on it and never use it on females. As in the lemur syndrome, polyamory for all could be a dividend, including the pleasure females take together, although monogamy would remain an option, and current studies suggest that women will vote for it for the foreseeable future. But, heterosexual or not, bonobos’ unique face-to-face sexual intercourse can produce what look like big smiles.

In the end, the simplest solution is staring us in the face, and it doesn’t require genetic tricks: go back to the rules that prevailed
among hunter-gatherers for 90 percent of human history. That means women and men working at their jobs, sharing, talking, listening, and taking care of children, their main link to the future. Men didn’t strongly dominate because they couldn’t, whatever their motives; women had a voice because they were always there, and their contributions were critical—not just in child care and in bringing home the vegetables that were the reliable staples but in speaking truth to would-be male power every night around the fire. Under certain circumstances, both polyandry and polygyny were available options. There was violence and it was mainly male, but it was mostly random and interpersonal, more like an accident than an ideology. We needn’t imitate hunter-gatherers slavishly; men should be able to do a lot more child care than typical hunters do. But at a minimum hunter-gatherers serve as a
human
model, showing us what is in our psychological scope without genetic change, and they probably also tell us something about what we were like for most of human history.