Procreative Sex May Soon Be a Quaint Relic, Study Says

Hmmm. Approaching 7 billion people; it seems the old fashioned way has worked pretty well... Probably more fun too, but I haven't tried in-vitro...

Yes; and this reminds me when the "scientists" said that by the 3rd millenium, we would only have 4 fingers.

They have made a lot of ridiculous predictions, I hope CR4'ers post some in this thread, just for the fun of it.

Yahlasit

We do only have 4 fingers. At least that's what the people around here (USA) are like.

Maybe they should now concentrate on taking the "designer made fetus (pick a sex, hair color etc.)" from the in-vitro and taking it full term in an artificial womb. This would make the female sex a lot more receptive to tube tying and just having sex for the pure enjoyment of it since they wouldn't have to worry about 8-9 months of not-so-much fun.

I can assure you that done properly, it is much more fun.

If the old-fashioned way wasn't fun and if babies weren't so darned cute, we would have ceased to exist many millennia ago. It's a good thing newborns aren't teenagers either. Our families would be much smaller.

Especially if they came into this world as 13 year old girls.

There is a missconception that clones come to this world, having the same age as their DNA donators. But the truth is that they have to undergo the whole process; from an egg cell to the zygote, to the fetus, then being born etc.

But they face a short lifespan due to the DNA "worn-out" sticky ends from their donators. Those ferrule-like ends shorten a little, after every chain duplication, they are necesary to keep the DNA chains from "frying" thus corrupting the information. (i.e when cells divide). At the end of our lives, the genetic code gets corrupted because of this and we develop a lot of diseases; our cells are degenerating.

And the new born is going to have already shortend ends at his DNA strings, thus a reduced nuber of duplications before degenerating of all tissues.

Yahlasit

There's an excellent movie on this subject that I would recommend to anyone who is even remotely interested in this topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

Unless a child were to result from each and every sexual encounter, (merely) procreative sex has always been a relic....

(On the order of 99.9% non-procreative?)