Whydid God create Adam before Eve? Because practice makes perfect, or so goes theold joke. Scientists have recently confirmed what many women the world over haveknown for centuries: men are obsolete, or close to it, anyway.

This latest salvo in theage-old battle of the sexes was fired by research conducted at the University ofNewcastle upon Tyne, where female-only conception came closer to becomingreality.

Macho posturing, itappears, will not do much good in the womb. It all points to the fact that menare increasingly super-fluous to today's requirements, and that women can,indeed, do everything.

If thesex ratio is sought to be skewed against women through selective abortions— and that's fast becoming an unmanageable problem — then thistechnology could well be the answer.

Women could withdraw from aman's world and start their own civilisation. The Y chromosome has also beenreported as shrinking, with male childbirth in the USA and Japan having declinedconsiderably.

According tostudies, environmental pollutants affect a certain sex-determining gene in thechromosome, implying that men are destined for extinction anyway.

Either way, this researchbrings to mind a world not far removed from the feminist utopia envisaged byCharlotte Perkins Gilman in her 1914 book Herland, where women reproduceasexually and live in an ideal society without war and domination.

Our histories of violencemight soon be exchangeable for the true end of history, in as much as war, alongwith its human (male) proponents, might be as extinct as the dodo.

Not surprisingly, women aren'texactly crying a river at the news; given how men aren't much good for anythingother than killing pests and opening jars, while always being overly concernedwith which man has the best toys.

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