Scientists warn that 'testicle mutations' could mean the extinction of men
Joe Yates
Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Image
This is not a great way to start off the day, reading about how the fellas next to your winky may pack in.
Okay, it's not exactly your testes that will fail but somewhere down the line after we all pass away, so your children's, children and so on... theirs could due to 'testicle mutations' which may see Y chromosomes stop working.
As I'm sure you're aware, our gender is determined by whether we've got X and Y chromosomes - which people assigned male at birth do - while people assigned female have two X chromosomes.
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Well, research has suggested that the Y chromosome is decreasing - which would eventually only mean one thing... maybe Beyoncé knew something when she released 'Run the World (Girls)' back in 2011.
Professor Jennifer Graves of Australian National University came out with a theory that in five million years' time there will be no more men on Earth - or anywhere else for that matter.
Her doomsday prediction is based on the rate in which the genes are disappearing from the chromosome.
If Graves' forecast isn't spooky enough, genetics professor Brian Sykes released a book back in 2003 titled Adam's Curse: A Future without Men and according to Sykes, our testicle time-bombs are ticking at a much faster rate - claiming that in as little as 100,000 years we'll be extinct.
But not everyone anticipates the demise of man.
Jennifer Hughes has challenged these claims and believes how Graves and Sykes have gotten to their assumption may be well off.
Alongside fellow scientists at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she explained how research published in 2005 compared human Y chromosomes to that of a chimpanzee - whose ancestry diverged from that of humans roughly six million years ago.
Now, Hughes and co's research has done the same thing but with the rhesus monkey - whose lineage we separated from 25 million years ago.
"The Y is not going anywhere and gene loss has probably come to a halt," Hughes told BBC News.
"We can't rule out the possibility it could happen another time, but the genes which are left on the Y are here to stay.
"They apparently serve some critical function which we don't know much about yet, but the genes are being preserved pretty well by natural selection."
Yes, her conclusion from comparing the two studies is that the decline has been minimal - explaining that the Y chromosome has lost no additional genes in the last six million years... while it only lost one in the last 25 million years.
So what do you think, are we here to stay fellas?