“Most California condors find members of their own species too intolerably ugly to consider as potential mates,” says Avian, “so this is really good news for them. And maybe for us as well. We can’t all be Instagrammable, after all.”

Last week, Flora Avian, lead researcher for the San Diego Zoo Alliance’s California Condor Preservation Project, announced that two of the birds in her care had been spawned via parthenogenesis, that is, asexually. “We did DNA analysis, and there was no father involved in these birds’ creation,” marveled Avian. “Usually we see this phenomenon in so-called ‘lower’ species, like insects. Seeing it something as complex as a bird — well, the implications are staggering. Might mammals be next? Might…humans?”

Explained Avian, “At first, we were thinking it was really good news for the ugly, people who might not otherwise have been able to reproduce because of difficulties in attracting a sexual partner. But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that this was great news for all of modern humanity. Research indicates that as people become more and more isolated by the forces around them — be they so-called social media networks, individualistic capitalism, the breakdown of the family on both extended and nuclear levels, the crumbling of traditional institutions such as churches and civic groups, and so on — they are having fewer and fewer sexual encounters. And for a number of other reasons, those encounters they do have are less and less likely to result in offspring. The demographic winter is coming for the First World. But if we can figure out their secret, these birds may just prove to be the phoenixes that help us to rise from the ashes of our own ruined civilization. As I like to say, ‘Yes we can…dor!’ Even though Bill in Sample Collection says jokes like that are the reason I’ll die alone.”

But not everyone was so delighted by the discovery. Noted evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins lamented the prospect of widespread human parthenogenesis, saying, “For millennia, evolution has been slowly improving humanity by natural selection: the fit breeding with the fit. This is going to put us right back where we started.”