Logged out
Access All our Essays in an Instant
Swap your work for FREE access, or pay £4.99 for instant access
Why is sexual reproduction so common in nature?
Member rating: No Rating | Words: | Submitted: Fri Jan 28 2005
Page Preview
On the left is an image preview of every page of this document, and below are the first 150 words with formatting removed:
Why is sexual reproduction so common in nature? One of the greatest challenges for evolutionary biology is explaining the widespread occurrence of sexual reproduction, and the associated process of genetic recombination. Sexual reproduction involves one individual combining half its DNA with half of DNA of another individual, so that the offspring is only half genetic copy of each parent. However, in asexual reproduction, the offspring are genetic copies of the parent. Thus, sexual reproduction poses an evolutionary problem because it seems to be half as efficient a method of reproducing as asexual reproduction. Asexual females can potentially produce twice as many daughters as sexual females, so that the ratio of asexual to sexual females should initially double each generation, resulting in the 'two-fold cost of sex'.? In addition to this 50% cost and the dilution of the individual's genome, sexual reproduction also presents other disadvantages in comparison to asexual reproduction. First and...
Get instant access
- Instant, unlimited access to our documents in full
- Swap your work for free access, or pay £4.99
- To see the full version of this document and 147,228 others
Receive email updates for this category
- Simply tell us your email address and receive a weekly Study Help Email for FREE
- Receive 3 FREE essay views with each email
- Get all the latest essays from Coursework.Info & discussion from TheStudentRoom.co.uk
