Is Sexual Reproduction Important?

     In one of the chapters in Dr. Tatina's Sex Advice, the author writes about how sex is important in life.  This book was presented in a way not only in a dry way of reading another book, but instead the author wrote the book as a conversation between an asexual reproducing species and sexual producing species.  The book was not only a conversation, it was a daytime TV show argument between the asexual producing species and the sexual producing species.  The main argument between the two groups were about the importance of sex.  The two sides believe in the opposite beliefs and the chapter describes the argument between the two.

     Sex is important because this process is the best way to maintain a functioning and healthy population.  Sexual reproduction has many benefits.  Sexual production creates genetic variation, can allow parents to raise young to ensure survival, and creates competition which allows the best to survive.  There are some costs, however.  Sexual reproduction requires a lot of energy and time, exposes you to parasites or disease, creates genetic combinations that can be bad, and not everyone can reproduce.  There are many benefits and costs, but the benefits outweigh the costs to show that sex is important in life.  There are also benefits and costs for asexual reproduction.  The benefits of asexual reproduction is that it is easy, takes a short amount of time, does not require two people, and can makes lots of offspring.  There are costs to asexual reproduction.  The costs are that there is no genetic variation that can lead to no resistance to change and that the species is more likely to go extinct if a new pathogen attacks or the environment changes.

     There were many arguments made, given that there are two sides trying to prove their respective points.  The first example of an argument says, "Sex may be fun, but cloning is much more efficient." (215)  The asexual reproduction strength is that they can make a lot of offspring in a short amount of time.  Another argument is given by the asexual side, "All else being equal, an asexual female who appears in a population should have twice as many offspring as her sexual counterpart." (215)  This quote shows how efficient asexual organisms are in producing offspring.  The amount is not just a little more than sexual reproduction, it is around two times more.  Another quote shows how productive asexual organisms are, "Each female must have two children for the population to remain the same size ... however, each female needs to have only one child for the population to remain the same." (215)  Again, the asexual organism is proving its point that the production and efficiency of the asexual reproducer can do less work and the sexual producer needs to do more work to remain constant.  This chapter gets evened out as the asexual producer fires arguments at the sexual reproducers.  A quote that supports the sexual production side states, "But although asexuality often evolves - it pops up in groups from jellyfish to dandelions, from lizards to lichens - it rarely persists for long." (216)  This quote shows one of the weaknesses of the asexual producers.  Asexual organisms do not last for long even though they can make many very fast and efficiently.

     I thought that this chapter was very interesting, but I did not know much about sexually and asexually producing in order to make a good viewpoint.  I thought some topics were confusing and I could have understood this topic better if I knew every single thing going on.  I want to learn about how scientists could make the sexually production organisms have less costs so that we would run in to less errors or problems.