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Women had better learn how to program the VCR and assemble flat-pack furniture in the next 125,000 years because that's when the last bloke will disappear from the earth, according to a new book.
Bryan Sykes, a professor of human genetics at Oxford University, caused a stir with the publication of his book Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men.
As a headline in Britain's Sunday Times quipped: "Bad News: Men Doomed. Good News: No Problem."
In Australia, ahead of the book's release here today, Professor Sykes said men would last for only another 5000 generations before dwindling fertility and a decrepit Y chromosome consigned them to the history books along with Neanderthals and trilobites.
Women, on the other hand, could look forward to plum jobs, good pay, tax-deductible child care, subsidised tampons, clean bathrooms and global peace.
"This . . . is a look into the future at how the Y chromosome will
deteriorate, and I think it certainly will," Professor Sykes said. "The
timescale is debatable but I think it is inevitable.
"I predict that the Y chromosome will be so damaged by that time that males will only be 1 per cent as fertile as they are now."
The Y chromosome, which carries the genetic switch to turn babies into boys at six weeks of gestation, is doomed, he argues in his book. "The Y chromosome is a genetic ruin, littered with molecular wreckage . . . a graveyard of rotting genes. It is a dying chromosome and one day it will become extinct."
He said men could be rescued with "massive intervention", but it would be quite possible to survive without them.
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