Original subtitles

What we are, in large part, depends on our genes.

It is a hand we are dealt when we are born,

and the cards we play our entire lives.

You can study as hard you can,

but some people will be smarter.

Work out as much as you want.

Some people are born to be bigger,

or prettier,

or more artistic.

The hand you get depends upon the luck of the draw.

Which genes you get from your mother,

which you get from your father,

and how they combine to make you a unique individual,

is largely a matter of chance.

In the game of life,

the shuffling of genes to create

a new individual is called sex.

But life did not have to be this way.

We could reproduce like some weeds do,

by putting out shoots. Talk about a family tree!

Or by fragmentation.

A little gruesome, maybe, but it works for tapeworms.

Spores are the method of choice for mushrooms.

Millions could show up for a family reunion.

Or we could do it the way amoebas do,

simply getting fat, and dividing.

But, no. We have to do it the hard way.

For human reproduction, it takes two, and sex.

This fact that it takes two organisms to produce one organism

is really a paradox in biology,

because it would be much simpler just for one organism

to produce one organism...

...virgin birth, or to have females

go about just cloning themselves and producing their offspring.

Consider the whiptail lizard.

These are parthenogenetic animals, which means they are all female.

This individual will lay eggs and all of the offspring will be female,

and they will be genetically identical to the sisters and to mom.

Now, this is efficiency.

A single sex.

When a whiptail's biological clock goes off, she just lays some eggs.

Sex education classes for whiptails would take about three minutes.

No complicated mating or that sperm stuff,

just instant motherhood.

Life by default is female.

Reproduction requires providing offspring with, with, ah, nourishments

and, and resources and,

and so, ah, this is the female function.

Um, and asexual species, species that do not have sex,

are always all female, um, with, without any males.

And so the female function has to exist for life to exist.

As you all know, for one thing and one thing only, do we need men!

Can you not do any better than that?

Oh!

The way I like to think of it is that the female is the ancestral sex.

In evolution the first individuals,

replicating individuals,

had to have been what we call a female-type of individual,

and that males evolved after those kinds of individuals.

But even here among the virgins, there is something else going on.

They do not have any need or even equipment for mating,

but that does not seem to stop them from trying.

These individuals will interact in a way

where one individual will take a male-like role.

The other individual will take a female-like role.

And in so doing, they will stimulate one another to lay eggs.

But if males are not necessary for reproduction,

why is there sex at all?

Why did males evolve?

The answers to why and how males became the second sex

are coming out of research into microscopic single-celled organisms,

bacteria.

We can do things to the bacteria that we would never dream of

doing to other organisms.

We can manipulate their mates.

We can make them have sex with members of different species even.

We can do all kinds of terrible things to them

and still come home at night and go to sleep without feeling bad.

Although we do not think of bacteria as being sexual

they do not have any of the obvious features that,

that we look for in a sexy partner.

They are in fact, very sexual creatures.

Bacteria that I study, they do not have any hang-ups about mating, really.

They take almost any DN A molecule.

They bind it and they bring it into the cell.

But they only recombine in those molecules that are from members

of their same species.

How sex started in the first place still puzzles evolutionary biologists.

Perhaps it started with a cell eating an associate,

the eater taking in the genes of the eatee.

The complex and wonderful world of sexual creatures may have begun

as cannibalism.

Well, that is one idea.

The second idea is that cells have sex,

not for their own well-being,

but because, for the transfer of the selfish, genetic elements that

live inside the cell.

This is the parasite theory.

When you look at it this way...

...self-centered genes are in charge of evolution,

and organisms are just a way for genes to duplicate themselves.

The third view is that sex evolves a kind of repair shop,

whereby the, the errors that are trapped in one cell

can be repaired by the spare parts that exist in another cell.

This is the view that we concentrated on in our work,

and the view that we think makes the most sense.

However sex got started,

it seems safe to say that through eons of evolution,

the creatures with two sexes were more successful than creatures

with just a single sex.

That is why sex has survived to become one of the facts of life.

In the beginning, and for hundreds of millions of year,

the earth's seas were seething with multiplying molecules.

There was no sex and nothing much changed for eons,

until one day some simple cells exchanged genes

and changed the world, literally.

Those simple cells that had sex, evolved.

It began with the first species that covered the globe.

Plants are basic.

They are the food for all the world.

And I consider biology the study of plants and their parasites.

And everything else is a parasite on plants to eat them.

We do.

And if we do not eat the plants, we eat something that ate the plants.

A botanist like Professor Warren Wagner

can be forgiven for being a plant chauvinist.

After all, in the beginning came pond scum.

It starts with a green algae.

And, the, the green algae have all sorts of life cycles.

Then they, you get to the ferns,

and the ferns have the simplest life cycle of all.

They are quite decent.

But then when you get to the sea plants, and particularly

the flowering plants,

it is really complicated,

and you get many, many, many different forms of sexual reproduction.

But what is the point? Why is there plant sex?

The present thinking, I think, is that sex is necessary for

the evolution of plants.

Plants require two specialties.

One of them is to reproduce,

to reproduce themselves, to occupy space.

And the other one is to change.

You have got to change,

because there are changes in climate...

...changes in rainfall, changes because of volcanoes,

changes because of new kinds of organisms.

And in order to be in this m�lange of all these constantly changing things,

you are going to have to change yourself.

And the only way to do that is through sex.

But plants have roots. They can not move around much,

so for there to be sex in the flower bed,

plants had to find a go-between to exchange their genes.

The secret to successful sex is attraction.

Oh! Look, people.

How do you like that marvelous plant?

That is a Dutchman's pipe.

Now let me tell you how this works.

This is a classic example of plants that have weird pollination mechanisms.

See the color?

That chocolate color attracts flies.

And the flies go there and say, "Good God!

That wonderful thing there looks like something to eat.

I could lay my eggs there and have baby grubs growing in it."

So what they do is they go down inside.

And in there are the sex organs.

Now the only bad news is that they have hairs down here.

These hairs are all pointing downward.

And he can not get out.

And he flies around madly in there and he gets all covered with pollen

and then at a given moment, and only the flower knows

when that is, the hairs all shrivel,

and he flies up, all covered with pollen.

The garden's glorious profusion,

the shapes and fragrances of flowers,

the intensity of color,

exist to promote pollination.

Blooming, buzzing, nature is pure unadulterated sex, and sexes.

Botanists talk about male and female plants,

but the difference between them lies primarily in the size and

function of their sex cells,

their gametes.

We use the words males and females, not when we have ... just sex,

but when we have sex between two gametes that are of different size.

The female sex is the sex that produces a large, very expensive,

and immobile egg.

The male sex is the sex that produces the relatively cheap,

small, and very mobile sperm cell.

And so the basic male function as represented in the sperm cell

is that of mobility of finding the egg.

The basic female function as represented in the energy-rich egg,

is that of nutrition.

But the distinction between the sexes is not always clear,

even among higher animals.

Usually people think males are on one end of a continuum and

females are on the other end.

But in fact, we all begin as a bisexual organism

and we then differentiate into male individuals or female individuals...

...in the case of mammals and many other vertebrates.

What we have discovered over the last fifteen, twenty years is

that the determination of sex is not a unitary phenomenon.

Not a unitary phenomenon is a researcher's way of saying the

whole thing is hugely complicated.

It starts simply enough.

All the genes in your body are packed into twenty-three pairs of chromosomes.

One of the pairs controls gender.

If the pair is two XX chromosomes, it is a girl.

If one chromosome is an X and the other a Y, it is a boy.

It is the luck of the draw.

Except among some, like the leopard geckos, who seem determined to

do things their own way.

Sex chromosomes do not count, at least in the beginning.

These are leopard geckos.

The male is, as you can see, quite a bit larger than the female.

They are unusual in that in these animals,

the sex of the individual is not determined at fertilization

or when egg and sperm meet.

The sex is determined by the temperature

at which the egg incubates.

This gecko was incubated at ninety point five degrees Fahrenheit

and became a male.

This one was kept at seventy-eight point eight degrees Fahrenheit

it and became a female.

So they do have the genes for maleness and femaleness,

just like in a human.

But the temperature at which the egg incubates determines

which cascade will be initiated.

The cascade. Hormones.

A complicated chain triggered by temperature in the gecko,

by sex chromosomes in humans.

Each hormone triggers a series of chemical reactions.

The flood of chemicals, in carefully timed sequence,

tell the body what to do.

The result is masculine or feminine,

depending on which hormone was acting when.

That is true for hyacinths and Homo sapiens, for walruses and wrasse,

which is a fish, a switch-hitting fish.

In this tank we have two species of sequentially hermaphroditic fish.

The white and black barred individuals are the humbug damselfish.

The other individuals are the blue-head wrasse.

In the blue-head wrasse you will have one male and a large number of females.

And that male will dominate all of those females.

If you remove that male,

the largest female will, within minutes, begin to behave as a male,

and within several weeks her physiology and morphology will change

and she will become a male individual, whereas before she was female.

What we think is happening in this process is that the brain

is directing the sex change.

In the humbug and the wrasse, behavior influences

hormones, which in turn influence behavior.

It happens in humans too, but in different ways.

Even though the brain and thinking and psychology and the social influences

are very important in human sexuality,

we really have not overcome our hormonal ancestry.

We still without a correct balance of estrogen and testosterone,

neither males or females, men and women,

can not function without that.

And many, ah, of the clinical problems I see in my practice

are due to hormone problems.

There are dozens of hormones that have a variety of effects

throughout a person's life.

Adrenaline is a hormone.

So is insulin,

and so is testosterone,

usually thought of as the male hormone.

And estrogen, the female sex hormone.

It is very easy for people to underestimate the power of hormones.

It is very much like people underestimate radiation or electricity.

You can not see it and the effective levels are so small

that it might appear to be trivial.

But these are extremely powerful compounds in the body,

and they are what shape sex in the individual.

It starts at conception. The genes trigger enzymes

which produce testosterone and estrogen

and control how the fetus develops.

Scientists have learned a lot from times when the process,

unfortunately, goes wrong.

It has gone wrong for several families in the Dominican Republic.

They are carriers of a rare genetic defect that

affects the body's ability to recognize testosterone.

Families like this one, which had seven daughters,

gradually discovered they were mistaken.

Chichi, when did you notice that you were not female?

When I was about ten or twelve.

And how did you notice it?

Well, my breasts did not grow.

Mario. What did you feel?

How did you know that you were not a girl?

In my muscles and in my body shape.

This condition suppresses the male cascade.

Baby boys have no visible penises or testes.

Then, the surge of male hormones at puberty,

testicles descend and the penis develops.

Most of the boys successfully manage to make the gender switch then,

and later marry as males.

So, what you see is not always what you get with gender.

Hormones must be produced and received in a specific order

for everything to come out right.

In the great majority of cases,

it happens on schedule.

Girls become women,

and boys turn into men.

Hormones serve as a biological clock through an individual's entire life,

shaping our bodies,

our lives, our society.

We will now tell you the meaning of life.

The meaning of life is making more life.

The more researchers look at the behavior of living things,

the more evidence they find that reproduction has choreographed

the dance of life.

The goal of both sexes is to have their genes represented

in subsequent generations.

The way in which males can most effectively do that is

to inseminate a number of females.

Now, from a female standpoint, one male is really enough,

so long as he is a good male.

Her major goal is to produce young that will

live long enough to reproduce themselves.

Nature's way of doing this is to hormonally

activate certain behaviors in its creatures.

An example: Some creatures have babies that are born pretty helpless.

In the wild, a single parent cannot provide both food and constant

care for its young,

so nature invented pair bonding, couples.

He likes to keep his hands in front of his face. He was even doing that in the...

Infant dependency in humans may have lead to the common pattern

that we see in humans of pair bonding.

It may be that this put a very strong selective pressure on

male parental involvement,

which led to the formation of pair bonds in humans.

To study how pair bonding happens,

researchers have turned to a small, brown rodent, called the prairie vole.

Early in our studies of the prairie vole we realized that

when animals mated,

their behavior changed very dramatically.

If a female had mated with a male, she became, she began to prefer him.

She, she seemed to become attached to him.

Professor Sue Carter and her team at the University of Maryland looked

at the hormone called oxytocin,

which is produced during pregnancy,

and known to promote mothering, as well as other behaviors.

And very simply, when you give oxytocin to a female,

it speeds up the rate at which she forms a social attachment

for her partner.

In male prairie voles, the changes after mating are also quite interesting.

Before a male prairie vole mates, the males are very friendly.

They are very non-aggressive, very good to each other.

As soon as the male has mated, he becomes intensely aggressive,

so aggressive that if he has to, he will kill a stranger in order to

keep him out of his territory.

Hormones again.

Vasopressin was also found to be released in males during mating.

This hormone has been shown to influence territorial behavior.

So our evidence suggests that vasopressin

plays a very important role in the onset of the aggressiveness

or the mate-defensive component of monogamy.

If some of the chemically controlled behavior of the prairie vole

seems familiar, perhaps it is because human

beings also produce oxytocin and vasopressin.

The important question that many people would like to know the answer to is

whether or not these hormones have the same behavioral effects in humans

as they do in animals,

and the answer unfortunately right now is, we do not know.

Nature is conservative.

It is a good guess if it has an effect on behavior in one species,

it may have an effect in humans.

In species like birds, where infants

need a lot of care, pair bonding is common.

Forty-five percent of bird species mate for life,

and another forty-five percent stay faithful through the breeding season.

Monogamy is rare among mammals.

Only three percent take a single spouse for a lifetime.

Human beings are an exception, more or less.

Studies show a quarter of American married men and a fifth of American

married women admit to having had adulterous affairs,

and half the marriages in the US fail, by the fourth year on average.

Perhaps we are not all programmed for lifetime bonding.

In humans it is popular to talk about the seven-year itch,

or now it is the, the four-year itch, suggesting that male interest

in the pair bond wavers after some period of time.

I do not know what the period of this is, but I think this really reflects a,

a, probably a fundamental difference between males and females and the

way they approach sexual behavior.

I think it is the characteristic of males that the, they have been selected

to be interested in sex on a relatively continuous basis.

Females, on the other hand, have been selected to be interested in sex on

an intermittent basis.

When females are interested in sex,

they are as intensely interested in sex as males are.

It is just that it is not as frequent as the case for males.

So I think this tendency for, ah, for pair bonds to split up

after some period of time

really reflect this tension between the male approach to sex and

the female approach to sex.

Gender differences in sexual desire have been stereotyped and

perpetuated for millennia,

but with even our gametes having different goals,

perhaps there is more to this than meets the eye.

Sexual behavior has been a focus of Professor Kim Wallen's work for

over fifteen years.

He studies rhesus monkeys.

One of the striking characteristics of, ah, non-human primates is that...

...although they are capable of mating,

most primate species are capable of mating at any time,

actually hormones are very important when they do actually mate.

So for a female rhesus,

although she could mate at any time in her cycle,

she actually only mates when she is fertile.

This suggests to us that the hormones that the female's ovary produces

actually influence her motivation to mate.

In the twenty-eight day cycle of rhesus monkeys,

Wallen has found that their sexual desire is greatest during their

three-day period of fertility.

During the days furthest from ovulation,

no sexual interest or activity occurs.

We find in humans like we find in other non-human primate species that

the females interest in sex and her behavior varies across her cycle...

...and her interest in sex peaks at mid cycle at the time

she would be ovulating.

And hormones affect individuals, who then shape society.

For example, work in our lab has recently found

that for a male to be integrated into a rhesus group

probably requires mating with one of the females in the group...

...and that this mating in public with one of the females

is crucial for that male being accepted by the other females in the group.

So sex serves not only a reproductive function,

but it also serves the function of, ah, social cohesiveness and social integration.

Once in a group, males may assume dominance

by displacing others, especially around feeding sites.

But the real social power is elsewhere.

Males spend their life living in essentially a female-dominated social structure.

And the females indicate when they want to engage in sex and

who they want to engage with in sex, and they are very persistent about that.

The pattern is common among other primate species,

like these pig-tailed monkeys,

and may have some analogs in human courting behavior.

It is clear in monkey groups that the female regulates the sexual interaction

and the female chooses which male she is going to mate with,

and when she is going to mate.

What is not clear is that

she is selecting between individual males on the special characteristics

that the males have.

Maybe the only way to find out why one animal picks another is to ask.

That is a boy gorilla.

Ha, ha. Trouble?

Coco was raised in captivity and taught to talk with sign language.

When she reached sexual maturity, they created a video dating service for her.

He lives alone, and he needs a girl.

She knew what she did not like.

She called one of her prospective suitors a toilet.

She had her favorites, though did not explain what her criteria were.

Do you like him? Good.

But after two years of being with the male of her choice,

Coco and Endume still have not consummated their relationship.

And female choice remains as mysterious to scientists as

it does to primate males.

Nature is a sexy place.

The living world is preoccupied with sex and mating.

But for most plants and animals,

sex is not without its costs and risks,

to both individuals and species.

Sex is a very expensive and time-consuming process.

Humans are well aware of the effort involved.

Most of us from birth, or early adolescence anyway,

are preoccupied with finding a mate, keeping a mate, and so on.

There is also the cost,

I should say of infectious elements.

Obviously, sex is a very intimate connection between the two organisms

and so viruses and parasites that make their living by living inside other organisms in our bodies,

for example, like the AIDS virus, and so on,

they have seized upon the sexual act as an opportunity to transfer themselves.

But there are other costs that are kind of hidden beneath the surface,

which are actually more important from the point of view of the theory of evolution.

These are the genetic costs;

the fact that a female, by taking just one cell from her mate,

the sperm cell,

ends up reducing her genetic representation in her offspring

by fifty percent.

So that is a one-half dilution in her genes to the next generation.

So this is a big genetic cost of sex.

Then there are also just the costs of males,

that is males take up roughly half the population in most species,

but they do not produce anything.

The rule in nature is that males do basically nothing.

Life is full of males that consume much and contribute little.

But their importance cannot be completely disregarded.

It is important to think of males as being more than simply a repository of sperm.

Males are more than a bag of sperm.

The behavior of the male is absolutely essential for normal

reproductive functioning of a female.

So if females are housed with males that are not sexually active,

those females will not go through the necessary physiological events

that are required to produce offspring.

Now in a sexual species,

the male behavior is very important for the normal reproductive functioning

of a female.

Females that are isolated from males very, ah, rarely, ovulate.

They need to see males. They need to be courted by males

in order to show the normal neuroendocrine kinds of changes

that are necessary to support reproduction.

For human beings, the question is more complicated,

partly because we cannot seem to shake the idea that men have

always dominated society.

But, it was probably Wilma, and not Fred, who was running things.

I suspect that the sexual activity of early hominids was quite different

than what we see in the modern society.

First, females were probably sexually much more assertive

than is the case today.

And secondly, female social relations were probably much more crucial to

the social structure of early hominid groups.

I think that the characteristic pattern of males to be interested in

sex rather continuously was probably the same then as it is today.

But it was females that regulated the sexual activity by initiating sex

with males when they were interested in it,

and not engaging in sex when they were not.

What has changed in humans is that they appear to be

more specialized for sex than is the case in other primates,

so that we have signals like breasts, lack of body hair with body hair

accentuating the genitals and erogenous areas.

But for humans, sex goes beyond simple pleasure.

The importance of sex in people's lives really varies.

Sex is very important, ah, in adolescence.

Then if you find a nice partner and you are married,

you do not think much about it then.

Ah, then sex is like money.

It, it becomes important if you do not have it.

If you do not have a relationship,

or if a person is not functioning well,

then sex becomes extremely important

and sort of takes over their whole lives

and people cannot think of anything else.

But when things go well...

...it is part of actual living.

We are the only species which is always ready to have sex

any season, any time of the month.

And that has had some social consequences because rules and

regulations and incest taboos had to be formed,

otherwise we would be having sex with everyone all the time.

So much of our social laws are for the control

of the sex drive in its proper channels,

otherwise society would be chaotic.

Some societies have tried to keep that chaos at bay,

by pretending sex was not a major force in our lives.

There have been enormous advances in the last twenty-five years.

Before that, the sexual, ah, the scientific study of sex was impossible

and we were in the Dark Ages.

As we go along, let us study the male anatomy.

Most men know less about their own bodies than they do about their automobiles.

Do not forget, masturbation was considered a diseases,

and doctors and educators and psychologists would tie the kids' hands down,

would tie the kids' hands down, ah, use electric shock and worse,

to try to eradicate this disease.

As late as 1959,

half the seniors at five Pennsylvania medical schools

believed masturbation would lead to insanity.

One in five of their professors believed the same thing.

And not one American medical college offered even a single course

on human sexuality.

We are totally in a different place.

Today a person who cannot have erections,

or trouble having feelings, sexual desire, can get help,

because we know the hormones that are involved.

We know the, the psychological factors that are involved.

Perhaps the greatest surprise in recent research has been the influence

that genes and chemistry have on all aspects of our behavior.

The search is now on for biological factors in gender preference.

Many homosexuals show some sadness and pain,

or disturbance with their fathers and other males.

But, on the other hand, there are also homosexuals who seem to have

a perfectly normal development.

So I think we are dealing with a multicausal phenomenon.

Some people, their sexual preference is determined genetically.

And in other cases, it may be just be preference or social choice, and,

I do not know.

And it is not a disease. So we do not look for a cause.

But I think there are many conditions under which a person will grow up

preferring their own, ah, gender.

I think we have to accept that human sexuality varies widely.

In the game of life, the odds are terrible...

...especially if you are a human sex cell.

At best, your chances of becoming a person are one in millions.

The human sperm, carrying half the genes necessary for a new life,

must swim the equivalent of three miles, upstream.

From a starting field of two hundred million sperm,

only five hundred even get near the goal.

Human eggs have a different battle, mainly old age.

Unlike sperm which are made constantly,

all the eggs a woman will ever have are formed when she is still in the womb.

By the time she is born,

her egg will already have dwindled from about twenty million to three million.

By puberty, the gametes will have further reduced to perhaps

three hundred thousand,

and only three hundred will ever have the chance of being viable.

Their chances decrease with age.

Oh, let us see.

To increase the odds, researchers have developed techniques

that allow an egg to be fertilized outside the womb.

Since 1978,

thousands of children have been conceived in shallow glass dishes.

Eggs can be artificially stimulated to develop,

and then extracted for fertilization.

Sperm are also subject to manipulation.

Here we have a sample of sperm underneath a microscope

that the TV camera is focusing on.

We are evaluating the various patterns of motion.

For instance we are looking at evidence of progressive motilla.

We see this sperm moving progressively from the top to the bottom of the screen.

And this would be a normal pattern of sperm motion.

On the other hand, if we see sperm either being immobile

or having a lot of difficulty in progressing,

then all of these characteristics will affect their capacity

to fertilize an egg.

Even imperfect sperm can now play a part in reproduction.

Using glass needles finer than a hair,

sperm do not even have to be mobile to fertilize an egg.

They can be directly injected through its wall.

Right now, all of the advanced reproductive techniques

are utilized in couples who are having difficulty in having healthy kids.

For the most part it is, it is couples who are, ah, are having difficulty in conceiving.

And in a more specialized area,

there are those couples who have had, um, who are carriers of genetic disease

in which we have the opportunity to, to, ah, to diagnose that

genetic disease at the embryo level,

and so that we can apply techniques

to try to increase the chance of, of these, of these couples having

a healthy infant.

Reproductive technology has obviously answered dreams for some.

Tens of thousands of children worldwide exist because of

assisted conceptions.

Among these children are some of the thirteen hundred

who have been conceived with

the help of the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Norfolk,

Virginia.

But does this mean we are approaching

a brave, new world where babies are produced to order on a laboratory

assembly line?

I think that it is unlikely the use of advanced reproductive techniques

themselves are going to, ah, change, ah, sexual behavior.

Clearly, ah, this technique is not really a sexual process,

ah, in that circumstance.

Ah, I have sometimes gone out of the treatment room where we have

done like an intrauterine insemination

and asked, ah, and asked the husband if he wanted to smoke.

But, ah, clearly that would be, ah, ah,

I think that it is unlikely that this is going to put, ah, normal sexual

behavior, ah, out of, ah, out of existence.

Biotechnology is young, but its accomplishments are startling.

We can freeze human sperm and embryos for future use.

We can gestate a goat outside a womb.

We can manipulate genes.

The question arises whether or not in the future

we will have the opportunity to try to utilize designer genes

and push the evolution of our species toward a specific set of traits.

Longevity, height, et cetera.

I think that, ah, that possibility does exist.

I think that it is probably, would be in the distal... in the distant, ah, future.

It is cute. It works. I do not think it is really me.

I agree.

Like me.

The future of sex has long been a preoccupation of science fiction

writers and fans

like these at Baltimore's Balticon Convention.

Ah, however you like, that is fine.

That is, that is actually pretty good.

One, two three. Hold it!

Don�t move!

I think that probably there will be more people

who are of indeterminate gender or ambiguous or several different genders.

Actually I am a Borg.

I am an asexual being

that was assimilated into a, sort of a hive mentality,

or a hive, a collective mentality.

So, male and female do not matter.

I suppose for folks that really want to have safe,

safe sex more people by themselves,

electronically, cyber, whatever, or, ah, virtual reality things are certainly,

I do think those will be appropriate and not looked down upon in the future.

Virtual sex is what most of us have when we do not have a partner.

I think that sex is virtual all by itself.

But, ah, given the, ah, given the current, ah, computer bulletin board and,

ah, e-mail versions of sex, ah,

I think that basically it is going to replace the vast majority of

foreplay, at least for men.

There you are.

Today's attempts at moving sex into the interactive computer era

are little more than animated comic books, explicit animated comic books.

I have been expecting you.

Shall we, mm, you know.

I have been told that I have a very sexy body.

Do you think I am sexy?

Now, take off my tights.

Oh. Does my body excite you?

Tell the truth.

But the industry promises Virtual Valerie

is just the beginning of the new age of cybersex.

Do you want to touch them?

In here we can be anything we want to be.

I will see you on the inside.

It is predicted that the computer will project the images

and provide the sensations for a kind of sex that can not exist in the real world.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha., ha! Come over here.

Virtual sex, which they are talking about today, is really not new.

We all live in a virtual sex world.

Whether, ah, we use a machine or our brains does not really matter.

Our fantasies are virtual sexual reality.

Maybe they will be enhanced a little bit by a machine,

but you will still have to tell the machine what it is you like,

what it is you desire,

what, ah, what your fantasies really are.

Perhaps the machines can make them a little bit more vivid,

but I doubt it.

I, our brains are the best virtual reality machines that there are.

Throughout human history, our brains have been a primary sex organ.

It is likely to continue that way into the future.

I think that it will be, continue to be two sexes.

But as we find extraterrestrial cultures, I am sure we will

find a lot of variations that we have never even imagined yet.

Actual change in the future by the, ah, freedoms of the female in the society.

They will start taking more chances than the males,

and more equality will arise.

Ha, ha. I hope that sex and reproduction are all still tied into, like the

making love, and that we do not lose too much of the old-fashioned ah...

It seems unlikely.

We are the product of our evolution, our genes and our hormones.

But we are more than that.

We are what we think, what we believe, what we imagine, what we hope.

And that can transcend the selfishness of our genes, the fight for fertility,

and the siren song of sex.

One really crucial and unanswered question

is whether species other than humans experience love.

The power of love in humans is so striking that

it seems unlikely that it is something that is unique to humans.

On the other hand, there is no evidence

in other non-human primates that anything analogous occurs.

Love may be the answer to some questions science has not asked yet.

Sex is easier to understand.

For three billion years the game has been underway,

shuffling physical characteristics and creating enough diversity

to survive whatever hand Nature deals us.

Sex is a game of change as much as a game of chance.

Life is in the cards.

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