In honor of Christmas, a pretty interesting article from Australia about the phenomenon of parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, which occurs in about 1 out of every thousand species of life on earth. Mostly, they say, it happens in extreme environments, but nobody is totally sure why.

The trouble with males, Professor Shine points out, is that they cannot reproduce themselves independently, they consume scarce food and they perpetuate maleness in a population through sex.

Females invest heavily in creating eggs, whereas “males are just coming along as parasites and throwing their genes into the mix”.

So if self-cloning is so much more efficient, why did 99.9 per cent of species choose sex?

A popular theory is the Red Queen hypothesis, named after the Lewis Carroll character who tells Alice that she must keep running simply to stay in the same place.

The big advantage of sex, that theory suggests, is that it creates genetic difference between individuals, driving evolutionary competition. Offspring differ slightly from their parents and from each other, with some better suited than others to adapt to new circumstances.

I think that’s pretty interesting to think about how everybody’s all hopped up about cloning, whereas ultimately it would be an evolutionary step backwards (according to this theory).