From Jeff Dodson
Douglas Fox suggests humanity is heading for extinction because the Y chromosome is fading away (24 August, p 28).
His analysis ignores one extremely important upcoming technology: within 50 years– in other words, within 1/100,000th of his envisioned 5 million years– we will probably be able to spruce up that Y chromosome to whatever extent we wish. We will be able to turn it upside down, inside out, add bacon and eggs to it, make it glow purple in a dark room, and modify it to work in the herds of flying pigs that we shall doubtless have at that point.
Our natural evolution is just about to come to a screeching halt, and we will be the architects of our own species long before 5 million years are up. Living systems are horrendously complex, but they are not infinitely complex. We’ll have it pretty well figured out within a small number of generations, I would imagine.
Seattle, Washington
