Has the mystery of sex been explained at last?

"SEX is the ultimate absurdity. Forget the hormonal rushes, the sweat and the contorted posturing. Forget about the heartache, the flowers, the bad poems and the costly divorce, just think about the biology. It's nuts. Cloning makes far more sense.

Forget the sweat and contorted posturing, just think about the biology. Sex is nuts. Cloning makes much more sense.

A clone, after all, just quietly gets on with copying itself. And since every clone can produce more clones, cloning produces far more offspring. There is no need for males - a waste of space, as hard-line feminists and evolutionists agree.

What's more, each clone has a combination of genes that has already been found fit for purpose. Sex, by contrast, randomly mixes genes into new and untested amalgams. And the horrors of sex don't end there. There is the problem of finding a mate, and fighting off rivals. Not to mention the risk of picking up horrible diseases like AIDS and all sorts of selfish replicators that exploit sex to spread themselves through the genome."

Curiosity piqued? It's from a New Scientist article my sister sent along (there are two crazy biologists in the family, she's studying ancient penguin DNA). To find out why sex is so important and how it all came about, head over to New Scientist.com

And be sure to check out the related slide show "Cloners vs sexuals: The great breeding wars"! ;o)

Oh, and for those who think cloning is science fiction... it's rare but several species of vertebrates have been know to do it! In animals it's called parthenogenesis, when a mother gives birth to a child without having being fertilised by a male (hmmm, where have I heard this story before?). We have a shark in the Li�ge Aquarium that laid several eggs... and she had NEVER been in contact with a male before. Several of her offspring are now in the Aquarium.