Why Sex?

摘要

Why sex? This has been one of the most fundamental questions in evolution-ary biology. In many species, males do not provide parental care to the offspring. Clearly, the rate of reproduction could be increased if all individuals were born as females and reproduced asexually without the need to mate with a male (parthenogenetic reproduction). Parthenogenetically reproducing females arising in a sexual population should have a twofold fitness advantage because they, on average, leave twice as many gene copies in the next generation. Nonetheless, sexual reproduction is ubiquitous in higher organisms.