More Fun Than Fun: Battles of the Sexes Can Now Be Made to Order – or Vanish 06/01/2021
N.G. Prasad and Bodhisatta Nandy. Right top: Flies under experimental selection. Photos: Evolutionary Biology Lab/IISER Mohali. Right bottom: A female fruit fly. Photo: R. Vijaya Anand/IISER Mohali.
When living organisms invented sexual reproduction over a billion years ago, they set in motion two conundrums, both for themselves and for evolutionary biologists. The first conundrum concerns the evolutionary cost of sex. In asexual species, every individual produces offspring. On the other hand, in sexually reproducing species, two parents are needed to produce offspring, so that populations of sexual species grow only at half the rate of asexual species. The evolutionary advantages of sexual reproduction that can potentially offset this two-fold cost of sex are the subject of much study and debate.