future world without men?

Yesterday G2 (a section of The Guardian) carried a fun article by Tanya Gold about a world without men, now that scientists can apparently make sperm from embryonic stem cells. There have been numerous articles in the past few years on how women no longer need men. Actually, we won't need women either when we can make artificial wombs, but let's avoid that avenue for now. Let's also ignore the fact that the scientists who have made this possible are mostly men. But let's still have some fun with this debate.

Tanya slagged off us mere men for causing most of the problems in the world such as war, religion, bad leadership and so on. The article was good fun so I'll put up with the rather biased selections she made, and add my own shorter list in response, with a similar amount of over-generalising and selection just to be fair.

Women and men are very different. Women like to live in peace and accept things rather than to change everything, whereas men tend to be much more focused on doing things, changing things, making toys and so on. Consequently that vast majority of scientists and engineers are men. If women had led the world for the last few thousand years, we would be living in dark but prettily decorated caves, eating berries and vegetables, with a maximum world population of about 60 million, all that can be supported by pre-technology nature. No-one would have bothered to invent the wheel yet, let alone agriculture. Living in peace and harmony with our very few neighbours would be easy, since it would simply be too difficult to have fights with them due to travel difficulty.

No, that's a little unfair - to men. Let's go back even further to a basic fact of nature. Males produce sperm and females produce eggs. The mutation rate in sperm is about 7 times higher than in ova, so it is reasonable to assert that about seven eighths of evolution is driven by mutations in the male rather than the female. Since sexual reproduction has been around for about 1200 million years, females can claim responsibility responsible for about 150 million years of this and males for the rest. So if females had somehow managed to make males redundant from day one, we would have so far evolved only as far as very small and very simple multi-cellular organisms that would make slime look ultra-futuristic.

Just as well we had males then!