Why is sex worth losing your head over? (Image: Oliver Koemmerling)

Gallery: Cloners versus sexuals: The great breeding wars

SEX is the ultimate absurdity. Forget the hormonal rushes, the sweat and the contorted posturing. Forget about the heartache, the flowers, the bad poems and the costly divorce, just think about the biology. It’s nuts. Cloning makes far more sense.

Forget the sweat and contorted posturing, just think about the biology. Sex is nuts. Cloning makes much more sense

A clone, after all, just quietly gets on with copying itself. And since every clone can produce more clones, cloning produces far more offspring. There is no need for males – a waste of space, as hard-line feminists and evolutionists agree.

What’s more, each clone has a combination of genes that has already been found fit for purpose. Sex, by contrast, randomly mixes genes into new and untested amalgams. And the horrors of sex don’t end there. There is the problem of finding a mate, and fighting off rivals. Not to mention the risk of picking up horrible diseases like AIDS and all sorts of selfish replicators that exploit sex to spread themselves through the genome.

Queen of problems

All this made sex the “queen of evolutionary problems” in the 20th century, taxing some of the finest minds in biology. The issue isn’t just explaining why almost all plants and animals engage in sex. It is also explaining why the life forms that ruled the planet for billions of years and remain by far the most abundant – the bacteria – manage fine without it.

That suggests that the ubiquity of sex among complex …