Will Be Still Need To Have Sex?

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.