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Asex and Evolution: A Very Large-Scale Overview

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Abstract

Asexuals come in all sorts. In this personal overview, I identify asexual organisms with eukaryotes that do not regularly go through the meiotic cycle. Such organisms may be asexual in many different ways and of many different reasons. The spread of asexuality is therefore always a unique process, and any notion of a general evolutionary advantage for asexuality is at best misleading. In discussions on the evolution of asexuality, ideas about genetic conflicts are often more helpful than notions about “costs”. Many asexuals are associated with different fitness problems, and most of them are not particularly good at being asexual either. Their absence of long-term evolutionary success follows from their lack of recombination, leading to complex effects involving drift and selection that we are just beginning to understand. The interest in asexual organisms comes not from what they say about sex, but from what they say about living as a eukaryote.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all participants in the European Science Foundation’s network on asexuality, PARTNER, for the fascinating and thought-provoking biology that they have taught me. Thanks for comments on the manuscript go to S. Adolfsson, A. Ceplitis, F. B. Christiansen, J. Fehrer, L. Hurst and I. Schön. Support from the Swedish Research Council and the Nilsson-Ehle foundation is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. Genetics, Department of Cell and Organism Biology, Lund University, Sölvegatan 29, SE-223 62, Lund, Sweden

    Bengt O. Bengtsson

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  1. Bengt O. Bengtsson
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Correspondence to Bengt O. Bengtsson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Natural Sciences, Royal Belgian Institute of, Vautierstraat 29, Bruxelles, 1000, Belgium

    Isa Schön

  2. Sciences Department of Freshwater, Royal Belgian Inst. of Natural, Vautierstraat 29, Bruxelles, 1000, Belgium

    Koen Martens

  3. Keygene N.V., Agro Business Park 90, Wageningen, 6708 PW, Netherlands

    Peter Dijk

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Bengtsson, B.O. (2009). Asex and Evolution: A Very Large-Scale Overview. In: Schön, I., Martens, K., Dijk, P. (eds) Lost Sex. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2770-2_1

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