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Pregnant Virgins

For people, sex is the only way to have babies and that, plainly enough, is its purpose. It was only in the last half of the nineteenth century that anybody saw a problem with this. The problem was that there seemed to be all sorts of better ways of reproducing. Microscopic animals split in two. Willow trees grow from cuttings. Dandelions produce seeds that are clones of themselves. Virgin greenfly give birth to virgin young that are already pregnant with other virgins. August Weismann saw this clearly in 1889. ‘The significance of amphimixis [sex],’ he wrote, ‘cannot be that of making multiplication possible, for multiplication may be effected without amphimixis in the most diverse ways – by division of the organism into two or more, by budding, and even by the production of unicellular germs.’2

Weismann started a grand tradition. From that day to this, at regular intervals, the evolutionists have declared that sex is a ‘problem’, a luxury that should not exist. There is a story about an early meeting of the Royal Society in London in the seventeenth century, attended by the king, at which an earnest discussion began about why a bowl of water weighed the same with a goldfish in as it did without. All sorts of explanations were proffered and rejected. The debate became quite heated. Then the king suddenly said: ‘I doubt your premise.’ He sent for a bowl of water and a fish and a balance. The experiment was done. The bowl was put on the balance; the fish was added; the bowl’s weight increased by exactly the weight of the fish. Of course.

The tale is no doubt apocryphal and it is not fair to suggest that the scientists you will meet in these pages are quite such idiots as to assume a problem exists when it does not. But there is a small similarity. When a group of scientists suddenly said that they could not explain why sex existed and they found the existing explanations unsatisfactory, other scientists found this intellectual sensitivity absurd. Sex exists, they pointed out; it must confer some kind of advantage. Like engineers telling bumble bees they could not fly, biologists were telling animals and plants they would be better off breeding asexually. ‘A problem for this argument,’ wrote Lisa Brooks of Brown University, ‘is that many sexual organisms seem to be unaware of the conclusion.’3 There might be a few holes in existing theories, said the cynics, but do not expect us to give you a Nobel prize for plugging them. Besides, why must sex have a purpose? Maybe it is just an evolutionary accident that reproduction happens that way, like driving on one side of the road.

Yet lots of creatures do not have sex at all or have it in some generations and not others. The virgin greenfly’s great-great-granddaughter, at the end of the summer, will be sexual: she will mate with a male greenfly and have young that are mixtures of their parents. Why does she bother? For an accident, sex seems to have hung on with remarkable tenacity. The debate has refused to die. Every year produces a new crop of explanations, a new collection of essays, experiments and simulations. Survey the scientists involved now and virtually all will agree that the problem has been solved; but none will agree on the solution. One man insists on hypothesis A, another on hypothesis B, a third on C, a fourth on all of the above. Could there be a different explanation altogether? I asked John Maynard Smith, one of the first people to pose the question ‘Why sex?’, whether he still thought some new explanation was needed. ‘No. We have the answers. We cannot agree on them, that is all.’4

Of Sex and Free Trade

A brief genetic glossary is necessary before we proceed. Genes are biochemical recipes written in an alphabet of four letters called DNA, recipes for how to make and run a body. A normal human being has two copies of each of 75,000 genes in every cell in his or her body. The total complement of 150,000 human genes is called the genome and the genes live on 23 pairs of ribbon-like objects called chromosomes. When a man impregnates