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Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Has the mystery of sex been explained at last?

All this made sex the "queen of evolutionary problems" in the 20th century, taxing some of the finest minds in biology. The issue isn't just explaining why almost all plants and animals engage in sex. It is also explaining why the life forms that ruled the planet for billions of years and remain by far the most abundant - the bacteria - manage fine without it.

That suggests that the ubiquity of sex among complex organisms has something to do with their ancient evolutionary history, not just the more recent past. Could there be some deep connection between the evolution of sex and the evolution of complex cells more than a billion years ago?

Oh, that mystery.

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