If you both pause during sex to do the clap during the Friends theme song, you’re soulmates
While sex purges our genome of harmful mutations and pushes biodiversity, it’s a costly exercise for the average organism. (…)
Their new estimates for the origins of reliable eukaryotic fossils now rest at 1.78 to 1.68 billion years ago, and this is where we must currently park the idea of when sex first became popular.
The age-old question that follows is why did sexual reproduction begin? Why didn’t life just keep evolving through cloning and asexual budding systems? (…)
Sex is not an efficient way of sharing genes. When we mate sexually we combine only 50% of our genetic material with our partner’s, whereas asexually budding organisms have 100% of their genetic material carried into the next generation. And Otto highlights what biologists call the ‘cost’ of sex, in that sexually reproducing organisms need to produce twice as many offspring as asexual organisms or they lose out in the population race.
Despite these drawbacks, evolution has shaped the living world in such a way that few large creatures today actually reproduce asexually (only about 0.1% of all living organisms, excluding bacteria). Sex generates variation, and that is certainly a good thing when dealing with constant and unpredictable changes in our environment.
