The woman who wants to abolish sex: Genetics expert urges us to embrace a future of virgin births (for women AND men) in which sex and marriage are redundant.
Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it … The wonderful Cole Porter song, Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love, lists many of the species who enjoy pairing off: ‘Even Pekineses at the Ritz do it!’
The Pekineses are not alone: 99.9 per cent of higher animal species reproduce themselves sexually. Species capable of reproducing themselves without contact between male and female are in the distinct minority.
Whiptail lizards and some hammer-head sharks apparently do it. Or rather, don’t do it. But so far no one has written a song about them and their lonely sexual endeavours.
But a research geneticist from Imperial College London, Aarathi Prasad, has tried to do the next best thing. Not only has she written a celebration of those eccentric creatures who are capable of reproducing by themselves without sexual contact, she controversially claims that sexless reproduction is the way of the future for humans, too.
A generation ago, test-tube babies were the stuff of science fiction: now, we accept these things as realities. In the same way, suggests Prasad, we could well be looking at a future in which human babies could be born without any sperm donors, let alone contact between the sexes. The future is sexless. Read full article.
