Why it pays to be a natural-born clone

摘要

Why should a diverse range of animals, from tapeworms to armadillos, do the biological equivalent of buying a batch of lottery tickets that all have the same numbers? Their strategy, known as polyembryony, is to split their embryos to produce many identical offspring. At first sight, this would seem to reduce the chances of winning the reproductive jackpot. But now, biologists from the State University of New York at Stony Brook have come up with an explanation.