Also yeah ‘impossible’ takes on whole new meanings when you’re personal friends with people like Jean Grey and the walking ice cube. Or a man who could make right angle turns while _running_ over a hundred miles per hour.

As long as I’m here. Remember the guilt trip Hank got for being interested in the mutant ‘cure’ a while back?

Let’s review Doctor McCoy’s genetic history: Born a mutant, further mutated to furry form by chemical exposure, then reverted years later by second chemical exposure as part of the set up for X-Factor as the original X-Men in their original form, modified by Apocalypse, then returned to his furry form by intercepting the mutagenic kiss Infectia had intended for Iceman, eventually followed by secondary mutation to ridiculous feline look.

I think the ‘letting nature take it’s course’ ship has sailed, if he doesn’t want to look like Bill the Cat he doesn’t have to.

http://biolog-e.ls.biu.ac.il/faculty/wides/80-855/SRYevol.pdf

“SRY can indeed disappear. It has done so in two species of the mole vole Ellobius [46]. In E. lutescens, both sexes are XO, and in E. tancrei, both sexes are XX, with one X inactive. A third species, E. fuscocapillus, has perfectly normal XY males and XX females. For many years it was thought that the sex-determining and differentiating genes on the Y had merely been translocated to another chromosome in the complement. However, it is now clear that although the E. fuscocapillus Y bears quite a normal SRY and ZFY, there is no SRY or ZFY in E. lutescens or E. tancrei. Evidently a new sex-determining system took over in a common Ellobius ancestor.”

“And how could the entire Y chromosome have been
lost in mole voles without imposing infertility on
Y-less males? This surely must have happened in
stages (Fig. 5), in which sex and spermatogenesis
genes were lost and each function replaced by a gene
on the X or an autosome. The loss of each gene would
further destabilize the Y chromosome, making loss
even more likely.”

“So how long have we got? A simplistic calculation
of the rate at which genes were deleted from the Y can
be made from the number of genes that disappeared
from the conserved and the added regions over the
past few hundred million years. The ancient part of
the Y was once homologous to the X conserved region,
which contains about 1000 genes. Only four survive.
Thus more than 995 genes have been lost since the Y
began to differentiate 170–310 Myr ago, giving an
attrition rate of 3–6 genes per Myr. Likewise, only
about 20 genes remain on the Y added region, out
of an original 500. Thus 480-odd disappeared over
the last 80–130 Myr, giving an estimate, again,
of 4–6 genes per Myr. At this rate, the human
Y chromosome might last another 10 Myr.

“Rashly assuming that our species lasts that long, what will become of us when the Y chromosome runs out of puff? Will human sex and fertility decline to zero, leading to our extinction? A more likely scenario is that first fertility genes will go, one by one, as their function is replaced by autosomal genes, then SRY will be replaced by another gene in the sex determining pathway. Accumulation of new variants at the site of this new sex-determining gene will start the whole process of sex chromosome differentiation all over again. Maybe this will happen more than once, independently. Populations with different sex-determining genes will not have much luck interbreeding, so this may well prove a speciating event that separates two new hominid species from us, their parent population.”

~P~
P-TOR