Birds do it, and bees do it. Indeed, researchers estimate that over 99.9% of eukaryotes reproduce sexually. What, then, are the true costs and benefits of sex? Yet again, this simple example ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) Why are most organisms sexual? The question of why most species reproduce sexually and others reproduce asexually has stymied biologists for years (particularly since asexual ...

For most living things, sexual reproduction has proven the best overall strategy to perpetuate a species in the rough-and-tumble, unpredictable fray of natural selection. With two partners combining ...

Two novel hypotheses have been proposed that address the “two-fold cost of sex”: one of the biggest enigmas in the evolution of sexual reproduction. The evolution of sexual reproduction in living ...

This story appears in the November 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine. In sexual reproduction—the way most life-forms procreate—each parent provides half an offspring’s chromosomes. Over ...