Will Be Still Need To Have Sex?

By Matt Ridley

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. You will then be able to take a cutting from your body and grow a new person, as if you were a willow tree. And if it becomes possible to screen or genetically engineer embryos to "improve" them, then in-vitro fertilization and cloning may become the rule rather than the exception among those who can afford it.

In a sense, we have already divorced sex from reproduction. In the 1960s, the contraceptive pill freed women to enjoy sex for its own sake. At the same time, greater tolerance of homosexuality signaled society's acceptance of nonreproductive sex of another sort. These changes are only continuations of a trend that started perhaps a million years ago. As Richard Wrangham, professor of anthropology at Harvard, points out, "Most mammals lose interest in sex outside a restricted mating period. For a female chimpanzee, copulation is confined to the times when she has a pink swelling on her rump. Outside those lusty periods, she would never think of trying to seduce a male, and he'd be horrified at the thought. But humans have taken a much more persistent view of sexual possibilities, probably since they first evolved as a species."

We share this interest in infertile, social sex with a few other species: dolphins, bonobo apes and some birds. But even if sex is too good for human beings to give up, more and more people will abandon it as a means of reproduction. Many people born from in-vitro techniques are themselves infertile--they inherit the infertility from their genetic parents. So infertility is bound to increase, and with it the demand for IVF. Add to this the demand from gay men and women and from those with private eugenic motives--ranging from not wanting to pass on inherited disease to wanting taller or smarter or prettier children--and sexless reproduction is bound to spread.

In the modern world, you can even have sex and parenthood without suffering the bit in between. Some Hollywood actresses may have satisfied the urge for mothering by electing to adopt children rather than spoil their figures (as they see it) by childbearing. For people as beautiful as this, the temptation to adopt a clone (reared in a surrogate womb) could one day be irresistible.

Once cloning loses its stigma, the urge to tinker with the genes of offspring may not be far behind. As Cambridge molecular biologist Graeme Mitchison says, "We can all be beautiful--no baldness, no wimps with glasses, no knobby knees." Olivia Judson, author of a forthcoming book called Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice for All Creation, begs to differ: "If there is such hostility to genetically modified soya, it doesn't bode well for genetically modified people."

Human cloning and designer babies are probably not imminent. Even assuming that the procedures are judged safe and efficient in farm animals, still a long way off, they will be heavily discouraged, if not banned, by many governments for human beings.

It is worth noting, however, that in much of the biological world, cloning is old hat. There are some species, such as those dandelions and whiptail lizards, that reproduce no other way, and there are many, such as aphids and strawberries, that switch effortlessly between sex and cloning. There are fierce arguments in biological circles about why such species have not taken over the world: since they reproduce so efficiently and do not waste energy producing futile creatures called males.

Two possible answers have been suggested. One is that males are necessary to combat disease: without sexual reproduction, a clonal species is vulnerable to increasing parasitic attack. The other theory holds that sex helps purge the species of genetic mutations by shuffling the genes in each generation.

Neither of these explanations need trouble us. We are not going to use cloning to make the whole of the next generation from one individual (though in the 1930s several eminent geneticists thought that when IVF became available, lots of people would rush out to choose prominent men such as Lenin as a father--which just goes to show how wrong geneticists can be about the future). Also, genetic mutations accumulate much too slowly to worry us.

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. If it were not for sex, there would be no blossoms and no birdsong. A flower-filled meadow resounding with the dawn chorus of songbirds is actually a scene of frenzied sexual competition. 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.

Matt Ridley is the author of The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. His newest book, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, is due out in February