Life without sex can have its downsides

Do not let the title of this post allow your imagination to run wild.  You are on a slippery path, dear reader!

The sex that this post is about is not about humans or porn.  Ditch that thought.  But, wait, don't go away.  You can always watch porn later.  Read this post, which will do you good ;)

Sex is nearly ubiquitous, but it hasn’t been easy to explain its ubiquity. ...
While sex may be a bit of a mystery to us all, it has been the grand enigma of evolutionary biology for decades.

No, it is not about humans.  It is about bananas and corn.  No, I am not using them as metaphors but literally.

Of the important global crops, the banana is the most genetically uniform. A single cluster of nearly identical genotypes, the Cavendish subgroup, nearly monopolizes the world’s banana groves and banana trade. In contrast to the riotous rainbow of genetic diversity that lends sustainability to natural plant and animal populations, the world’s banana industry has the stability of an upside-down Egyptian pyramid balanced on its tip.
That fact leads to another superlative: The commercial banana is the world’s most endangered major crop. The future of the intercontinentally traded banana was once, and is again, precarious.

Talking about the precarious state of bananas is not new here.  But, in that post, I didn't go into the importance of sex.

What about sex and bananas?

Domesticated banana plants are self-copying machines.

With the emergence of the 20th century, the confluence of the Industrial Revolution with plantation agriculture led to the propagation of a single globally favored banana genet (descended from a single instance of sperm-egg fusion) for export from the tropics to waiting markets in the industrial north.

So, why would I want you to think about sex when eating a banana?

Because most important crops reproduce only by sexual seed, they cannot be clonally propagated. Not surprisingly, the genetic variation generated by sexual reproduction is an obstacle for many folks looking to deliver a better crop product. For the past quarter century, some plant biotechnologists have argued that future crops should follow the banana, dispensing with sex entirely. Specifically, they are titillated by the idea of varieties that replicate the maternal plant via reliably uniform, asexual, apomictic seed.³ One proposal is that the plant breeders would maintain sexually fertile lineages that, when crossed, would create apomictic offspring. A second approach would be to genetically engineer plants to be apomictic. The seeds produced by either method could be delivered to farmers, who benefit from the crop’s uniformity.

So, is it a good thing, or a bad thing, to dispense with sex entirely?

It depends.

The explanation for sex isn’t straightforward. Sex is a hassle. To reproduce without sex, an organism can dedicate a cell toward creating a new individual, pump it up with some resources, and eventually set its baby free. The organism that uses sex to reproduce has a greater challenge; it has to create gametes that have to find other gametes. The process of seeking or attracting those other gametes typically involves allocation of resources to special structures and, in the case of animals, allocation of resources and time to special behaviors.

Why not let technologists work it out in the lab?

The original Cavendish-resistant Panama disease culprit has now been named Race 1. Panama disease fungi have evolved; the Race 1 genotypes are being replaced by one known as Race 4, which first appeared in 1965. Cavendish has no resistance to Race 4. The evolutionarily new and improved Panama disease organism has wiped out thousands of Cavendish acres in Southeast Asia. Since then it has been identified in the Pacific, Australia, Africa, and the Middle East. Worse yet, in 2011 Cavendish bananas in India started succumbing to what appears to be a new genetic variant of Race 1. The bad news is that Cavendish is fully sexually sterile.

Sex might be a hassle, messy, and needing resources.  But, it is key to survival. 

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