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Will We Still Need to Have Sex? by Matt Ridley Birds do it. Bees do it. But we may no longer have to do it -- except for the fun of it... First, the good news: people will still be trying to get each other into bed in 2025, though one can only hope the pickup lines will be different by then. Now here's the revolutionary (or should I say evolutionary) news: sex will seem a lot less necessary than it does today. Having sex is too much fun for us to stop, but religious convictions aside, it will be more for recreation than procreation. Many human beings, especially those who are rich, vain and ambitious, will be using test tubes -- not just to get around infertility and the lack of suitable partners, but to clone themselves and tinker with their genes. Lots of creatures already reproduce without sex: whiptail lizards, aphids, dandelions, microscopic rotifers. And, of course, human beings. Since the birth of Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, in 1978, hundreds of thousands of human beings have been conceived in laboratory glassware rather than in bed. If human cloning becomes possible -- and since the birth of a sheep called Dolly, few doubt that it will be feasible to clone a person by 2025 -- even the link between sex organs and reproduction will be broken... And even if sex proved to be genetically unnecessary, it still wouldn't be a total waste of energy. It is to sex, after all, that we owe most of the things we consider aesthetically appealing in nature.... Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at University College London, has pointed out that everything extravagant about human life, from poetry to fast cars, is rooted in sexual one-upmanship. "If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning," said Aristotle Onassis, who should know. Or, as Henry Kissinger put it, "power is the great aphrodisiac." So where would humans -- and human civilization -- be without sex? Probably back with the aphids and dandelions, I suspect, procreating effortlessly but building neither empires nor cathedrals. |
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