Questions about genders ... male/female

[tantric]

Oh good grief, *hundreds* of papers have been written about it. They've even run experiments with species that have both sexes and hermaphrodites. And BTW, the male/female thing is mostly for land animals. Lots of ocean fish don't work that way - like ribbon eels or clownfish. Stuff like asynchronous hermaphrodites (animals that are born male then turn female). Not to mention plants, and then fungi, which are + and - instead of M/F. Or you could look here, in wikipedia. There was recently a paper published that showed how primroses that use sexual reproduction don't accumulate harmful mutations.

First off most fish are either male or female, whether they live in salt or fresh water. Secondly I of know of the strange nature of reproduction with some animals, but the real question remains sexual reproduction is complicated and the two sexes would have to evolve at the same exact time in all their complicated needs or poof.

GC

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You started a question for which no one has an answer and have since failed to realize that there is no importance whatsoever in having done so. It's trivially easy. Why did I mix my whiskey with ginger ale, that you can;t answer means "therefore no god".

Now you're just being stupid or you've had to much to drink.

GC

Okay, try again. Imagine a world without sex, where all animals are hermaphrodites. When they mate, they exchange gametes and both become pregnant and eventually bear young. Each one benefits the same - let Y for young be the benefit of having kids. Now there's a cost to pregnancy - the organism has to eat more and is less fit and capable of surviving while pregnant. There's also a cost to fertilizing another organism, just giving gametes, but this is MUCH less costly than being pregnant and having young. So, let F for female be the cost of being pregnant and M for male being the cost of producing sperm and impregnating another. Just as an estimation, we might say that 100M = F, or that it takes a hundred times as much energy to carry and bear young than it does to just drop a load and go. With me? If we have two creatures, A and B, that are both hermaphrodites, the cost of producing a new generation for both is Y - (F+M) - the benefit of having young less the cost of producing sperm and carrying the young. Now, suppose that B is a mutant - instead of carrying the young, it just miscarries every time. So, when A and B mate, the net for A (the hermaphrodite) is Y-(F+M), but for B it is just Y-M. Considering that M is 1/100th of F, the benefit to B is HUGE...but you can't have a species of all males, so when B passes on his genes, if he does so in a manner so that all his kids are males.....there is no third generation. It is in B's best interest to sire a generation that has as many females as possible...It is possible to construct mathematical models of this and run it through a computer - trust me, I've done it, and it works. You can also show why some species reproduce every year and why some reproduce once and die - it's math. The textbook for this class was called "The Theoretical Biologist's Toolbox" and it involve learning a truly heinous programming language called 'R'. But it's basic coursework for graduate level ecology and evolutionary biology students and not at all a mystery. Despite all this, I prefer to believe in something completely different, as explained in the song "The Origin of Love" by Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It has gods and supernatural stuff in it, but is also fairly reasonable, so maybe that will work for you.


Hmmm, teaching and discourse rather than insults....