Men are living on borrowed time, according to a leading female scientist.
Professor Jenny Graves even claims the male of the species is heading for extinction.
And chaps, the bad news doesn’t end there, because the process may have already started.
Battle of the sexes: A leading Australian expert says ‘inherent fragility’ of the male sex chromosome will lead to male demise
A CHROMOSOME CRISIS
The female, or X, chromosome, contains around 1,000 genes, and females have two of them.
The Y chromosome started off with as many genes as its female counterpart.
But over hundreds of millions of years it has crumbled away, leaving fewer than 100 genes in modern man.
This includes the SRY gene, the ‘male master switch’ that determines whether an embryo is male or female.
What is more, while women have two X chromosomes, men have just one, ‘wimpy’, Y.
This is key, as the pairing allows the X to make crucial repairs.
Lacking a mate, the Y chromosome finds it more difficult to patch up mistakes and so decays away.
Professor Graves, one of Australia’s most influential scientists, believes that women will win the battle of the sexes – and in the most definitive way possible.
She says that the inherent fragility of the male sex chromosome, the Y sex chromosome, means that men are sliding towards extinction.
Professor Graves’s prediction hinges around the number of genes on the male and female sex chromosomes.
The female, or X, chromosome, contains a healthy 1,000 or so genes.
What’s more, girls and women have two of them.
The Y chromosome started off with as many genes as its female counterpart.
But over hundreds of millions of years it has crumbled away, leaving fewer than 100 genes in modern man.
This includes the SRY gene, the ‘male master switch’ that determines whether an embryo is male or female.
What is more, while women have two X chromosomes, men have just one, ‘wimpy’, Y.
This is key, as the pairing allows the X to make crucial repairs.
Lacking a mate, the Y chromosome finds it more difficult to patch up mistakes and so decays away.
Professor Graves, of Canberra University, said: ‘The X chromosome is all alone in the male but in the female it has a friend, so it can swop bits and repair itself.
‘If the Y gets hit, it’s a downward spiral.’
Giving a public lecture, the professor said: ‘It is very bad news for all the men here.’
And there is more bad news.
In her talk at the Australian Academy of Science, the professor described the remaining genes on the Y chromosome as being mostly ‘junk’.
She said: ‘It’s a lovely example of what I call dumb design.
‘It’s an evolutionary accident.’
However, there is some good news.
Battle of the sexes: Researchers say the Chromosomes, shown here in a computer simulation, could lead to men becoming extinct – in millions of years
Professor Graves estimates that it will take five million years for the Y chromosome, and the men it produces, to disappear all together.
Other experts urged men not to panic.
Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, a sex chromosome expert from the National Institute for Medical Research in London, said that studies have shown the decay to occur in bursts.
And the Y chromosome has not lost any genes for at least 25 million years.
He said: ‘I would say this is of no concern whatsoever.’
Professor Chris Mason, of University College London, said that even if the Y chromosome does crumble away in the next few million years, medicine will have plenty of time to catch up.
He said: ‘Five or six million years should be plenty of time for medical science to produce a fix and probably a Nobel Prize.’
Professor Graves has her own solution.
She says that when Y chromosome falls to pieces, another chromosome could take on the role of the missing Y, leading to the creation of a new species of human.
There is already a precedent for this in nature, in the form of a Japanese spiny rat which has survived the loss of its Y chromosome.
In fact, the process may already be underway in some isolated groups of people, said the professor.
She said: ‘We would not even suspect it without checking the chromosomes.’
