It is no secret that men are basically genetically modified women. In this respect, our evolution can be regarded as a gigantic and long-running GM experiment. Its legacy has been to endow men and women with different and often conflicting sets of genetic interests.

It is a weary lament to lay most acts of violence and aggression squarely at the feet of men. Yet the association is strong and undeniable. Women only rarely commit violent crimes, become tyrants or start wars.

The accusing finger points at the only piece of DNA which men possess and women do not: the Y-chromosome. Ironically, although the Y-chromosome has become synonymous with male aggression, it is intrinsically unstable. Far from being vigorous and robust, this ultimate genetic symbol of male machismo is decaying at such an alarming rate that, for humans at least, the GM experiment will soon be over. Adam, it seems, is cursed. Like many species before us that have lost their males, we run the real risk of extinction.

The Y-chromosome is in a mess — a genetic ruin littered with molecular damage. Why is it such a shambles? Originally, the Y-chromosome was a perfectly respectable chromosome, just like the others, with a collection of genes doing all sorts of useful things — but its fate was sealed when it took on the mantle of deciding sex.

This probably happened in the early ancestors of the mammals, perhaps 100m years ago when they were small, insignificant creatures doing their best to avoid the ruling dynasty of the time — the dinosaurs. A mutation on one of those ancestral chromosomes suddenly, and quite by chance, enabled it to switch on the pathway to male development.

The problem is that the Y-chromosome has never been able to heal itself. Unlike X-chromosomes, which pair up and swap genes to minimise bad mutations, the Y-chromosome, which has no partner, cannot repair the damage inflicted by mutations, which keep accumulating. Like the face of the moon, still pitted by craters from all the meteors that have ever fallen onto its surface, Y-chromosomes cannot heal their own scars. It is a dying chromosome and one day it will become extinct.

Male infertility is on the increase. An astonishing 7% of men are either infertile or sub-fertile. There are a whole host of causes but a substantial proportion, that is between 1% and 2% of all men, are infertile because of mutations on their Y-chromosomes. That is an astonishingly high figure. The human Y-chromosome is crumbling before our very eyes. There is no reason to think things will improve — quite the reverse, in fact. One by one, Y-chromosomes will disappear until eventually only one remains. When that chromosome finally succumbs, men will become extinct.

But when? By my estimate, the fertility caused by Y-chromosome decay drops to 1% of its present level within 5,000 generations, which is about 125,000 years. Not exactly the day after tomorrow — but equally, not an unimaginably long time ahead.

In June, the journal Nature announced the almost complete sequence of a human Y-chromosome, which revealed something completely unexpected. There were signs that amid the wreckage of once-active genes, the Y-chromosome is still capable of safeguarding genes — but only by effectively having sex with itself. Does this mean that men are now saved from extinction? Sadly not. Does the news extend men’s day of reckoning? Unfortunately not.

I deliberately use “men” instead of “our species” because only men require a Y-chromosome. Of course, unless something changes in the way we breed, women will vanish too and our entire species will disappear at some time in the next 100,000-200,000 years.

The questions we face boil down to this. Do we need men? Can we do without them? There are many, of course, who would rejoice at the extinction of men. Valerie Solanas was one. She is best known as the woman who shot Andy Warhol in 1968. The previous year she published the venomous SCUM manifesto, which begins: “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”

The expanded acronym of her manifesto title — the Society for Cutting Up Men — leaves us in no doubt as to Ms Solanas’s preferred solution to the world’s problems, but unless other arrangements are put in place, their demise will take women with them. Destroying the male sex would be a very short-lived victory. Men are still required for breeding, if nothing else. As things stand just now; sperm are needed. But for how much longer? One genetic solution that I offer is to abandon men altogether. It sounds impossible but, from the genetic point of view, very little stands in its way.

Consider what is happening when sperm meets egg. The sperm brings with it a set of nuclear chromosomes from the father which, after fertilisation, mixes in with a set of nuclear chromosomes from the mother. What is to stop the nuclear chromosomes coming not from a sperm but from another egg? Let’s think this through a little more. We know that sperm can be injected into eggs. If we can do that, there is nothing to stop the nucleus from a second egg being injected instead. That would be very easy. But would it develop normally? At the moment the answer is no, but it is short-sighted to say that it is fundamentally impossible.