Eve's secrets Book

A bee lands on a blossom, a stag rears back his head in bellowing, a human couple lies exhausted in passionate embrace. The flower, the deer, the human, even the unseen virus - they all must have sex. But why? When we think of sex, we may think of the pleasure and pain it causes us. But there is a more fundamental problem of sex. It is the unresolved question of why sex exists at all. What are the consequences of sex that make it so important to us and so widespread in nature? The answer to this question lies not in our own attitudes and feelings about sex, but deep in our evolutionary past. Why did sex evolve as the means for reproduction for many species? Sex requires a huge commitment of time, energy, and resources, and it can even be physically dangerous. Sex is not the only path to reproduction - simple life forms do not practice sexual mating; offspring are produced by simple cell division. There are examples of higher life forms that practice asexual reproduction, in which the female reproduces alone. "Why sex?" is a question that was first raised by Charles Darwin in his Origin of the Species, and the answer has eluded biologists for over a century. In Eros and Evolution Richard Michod, a leading evolutionary biologist, begins his exploration into this question by pointing out the fatal flaws in the widely accepted "variation view, " that sex is necessary for producing more diverse offspring than could be produced asexually. Chief among those flaws is the fact that sex undoes what it creates, producing a beneficial new combination of genes in one generation only to break it apart in the next. Michod argues that genetic variation and reproduction of organisms are side effects butnot the sole purpose of sex. According to his revolutionary theory, sex has a more far-reaching mission: to repair and overcome the genetic errorsdamages and mutations - that threaten life. With lucid explanations and intriguing excursions into our evolutionary past, this book sh