The Oigin of Sex

While I was reading through some articles yesterday, I came across one titled "The Origin of Sex: Cosmic Solution to Ancient Mystery". As a full-blooded, able-bodied and healthy male, I just couldn't resist the temptation to click on this article. No, it's not about something dirty, but literally the origin of sex, or more accurately the reason why we have sex to reproduce.

Now apparently this is a mystery that even scientists don't have an exact answer to. It may seem natural to all of us that we should reproduce sexually after we grow and get married. Even the animals do it. It has been that way for as long as anyone can remember, so surely it has been that way for all time. However, scientists say that logically, life should have evolved without sexual reproduction (i.e. through asexual reproduction) and it would have managed fine.

"Sex should have never happened", is something biologists often say. On early Earth, all primitive organisms reproduced asexually. In fact, some organisms still do the same today. Potatoes give an eye to produce a new potato and sponges produce the next generation via buds. This is a simple yet powerful way to ensure the survival of a species. No need for a partner and all the intricacies of courtship, no dilution of the genetic code, no random chance involved in the traits passed down - the next generation is a perfect clone.

So why did life change to reproduce sexually? Well, biologists theorise that, ironically, sex could have resulted from stress, environmental stress that is. They did an experiment with computer involving digitally simulated asexual organisms. Then they created stress in the digital environment, simulating events like an asteriod impact or high levels of radiation. The result? They found that when stressed under such conditions, these digital organisms had a "flurry of mutations", which sent them down the path of sexual reproduction. This is because asexual reproducers cannot handle a large number of mutations in a short time, they are the so called "evolutionary slow train". Sexual reproduction, however, "allows plants and animals to evolve quickly, because the gene pool mixes and the fitter survive."

If this theory is true, then, in a sense, we are all mutants. And the reason why we evolved to the way we are today is more or less because of pure chance. However, as the experiment was conducted using a simulation, we can never be sure. And experimentation on real life organisms would never work as it would just simply take too long.

So I guess we may never know for sure the true orign of sex or why sex exists. But, hey, I'm not complaining. The world is definitely a much more interesting and beautiful place because there exists another gender of humans for us guys to look at. ;)

Comets and asteroids have been blamed for a lot of things before. Shaping Earth. Jumpstarting life. Wiping out dinosaurs. Even possibly altering human evolution.

But never sex.

Roughly 1 billion years after the first organisms romped in the hay, the origin of sex remains one of biology's greatest mysteries. Scientists can't say exactly why we do it, or what triggered those initial terrestrial flirtations. Before sex, life seemed to manage fine by employing asexual reproduction -- the cloning of offspring without the help of a partner.

Now a new study out of Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has used digital organisms to simulate life before sex and yielded a possible mechanism for instigating Earth's first courtship.

Click here for the full article.