On the Origin of Sex: The Weird and Wonderful Science of Reproduction addresses the compelling question: What is the point of sex? Professor of biological sciences Lixing Sun (The Fairness Instinct; The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars) illustrates that asexual reproduction initially seems more efficient from a purely mechanical standpoint. There are no partner requirements--that is, no energy wasted on courtship rituals or competition, and the full complement of an organism's genes gets passed on to the next generations. Sexual reproduction, by contrast, is "costly," complicated, and seems to limit genetic inheritance. Part of the answer is that "sex reshuffles the genetic deck, mixing genes from the broader pool and dealing out fresh combinations with every new generation," thus avoiding the accumulating mutations in asexual reproduction that, over time, can lead to extinction.
Sun's work examines life in all its forms across the globe and is in no way confined to mammals. There are examples of fungi with thousands of distinct mating types, slime molds whose sexual architecture defies easy categorization, plants that toggle between reproductive strategies depending on environmental cues, and fish that change sex not as anomaly but as part of ordinary life. By the time Sun returns to the likely more familiar territory of vertebrates and humans, readers' conceptual vocabulary has been so thoroughly expanded that even the familiar looks new.
Some of the most striking insights concern the sheer plasticity of sexual systems found in nature. The two-sex model, which humans tend to project onto the rest of life, emerges from Sun's analysis as one particular solution to the reproductive problem, shaped by evolutionary pressures that could just as easily have produced something radically different. Temperature-dependent sex determination in reptiles, functional hermaphroditism in reef fish, parthenogenesis in vertebrates thought incapable of it, are shown to be windows into the underlying logic of reproduction itself. The cumulative effect is a profound correcting of assumptions most readers never knew they held.
Sun doesn't shy away from following science into cultural territory, showing how reductive definitions about gender reduce it to "social attributes" derived from biological sex, ignoring "other key players like morphology, physiology, genetics, hormones and neurons." Questions about the biological basis of human sex and gender are addressed with a winning combination of empirical rigor and engaging writing. Sun reports what the biology shows and what it cannot yet resolve with the confidence of a researcher who has spent his career in conversation with his subject. On the Origin of Sex: The Weird and Wonderful Science of Reproduction excels at making complex population genetics and evolutionary modeling feel both intuitive and entertaining. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.
Shelf Talker: On the Origin of Sex is a rare and spirited work poised to change not just what readers know but how they see the world.