[XJarhead]

Why make sons and males, if you could just produce females that were able to reproduce by themselves? That's a division of resources into two sexes that seems unnecessary," she said

I cannot believe a person with those academic credentials could ask such a stupid question. The genetic variation and natural selection argument seemingly cuts that to ribbons.

[r9etb]

I cannot believe a person with those academic credentials could ask such a stupid question. The genetic variation and natural selection argument seemingly cuts that to ribbons.

I cannot believe that somebody as smart as you can't see the problem. If sex evolved, how could it evolve without some means of transmissible genetic variation?

[Ichneumon]

I cannot believe a person with those academic credentials could ask such a stupid question.

Neither can I, especially when the many genetic/evolutionary advantages of sexual reproduction have been well known for *decades*.

I suspect this article is yet another example of a depressingly common trend: A reporter who understands too little about a scientific story to accurately present it, but doesn't let that stop them from trying to make their report more "dramatic" by playing up humdrum ongoing research as a "mystery" or a "revolution" of some sort.

In this article, it's the "mystery" of how "no one knows" why sex exists but the adventurous scientists are hot on the trail like Sherlock Holmes...

[Nick Danger]

I cannot believe a person with those academic credentials could ask such a stupid question. The genetic variation and natural selection argument seemingly cuts that to ribbons.

That ought to cut both ways, though. One of the Great Mysteries, it seems to me, is why mitochondria have never developed an adaptation that attacks or interferes with arriving sperm that carry a Y chromosome.

If I'm a mitochondrium, and I'm in the egg waiting for a sperm to come along, it is in my interest to kill any Y-bearing spermatozoa. The only way my genes get any farther than one more generation of humans is if this egg I'm in gets fertilized with an 'X'.

If this adaptation had ever arisen, it would be noticable in maybe 50 or 100 generations. We would see 60-40 or even 70-30 ratios of female to male babies being born. This would be a highly successful adaptation for the mitochrondria. Can you think of any reason why this could not happen?

[MEGoody]

"The genetic variation and natural selection argument seemingly cuts that to ribbons."

But why was that required? The first single-celled organisms didn't have intercourse to reproduce, did they? And yet they somehow 'evolved' into something else at some point. The question is then, why did they later evolve into creatures that reproduced via intercourse? What was the purpose? And what factors specifically caused the evolution of two sexes?