The Enigma of Sex, Part 1
Curious Cases
BBC
4.8 • 4.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2018
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"Why do we only have two sexes and are there any anomalies in the animal kingdom?" asks Robert Turner from Leeds.
From reptilian virgin births to hermaphrodite sea slugs, over the next two episodes Drs Rutherford and Fry examine the weird ways other creatures reproduce.
In this first instalment, they tackle what's been called 'the hardest problem in evolutionary biology' - why does sex exist?
Why aren't we all one single sex that clone ourselves to produce offspring? It makes perfect evolutionary sense - you could pass on all of your genes and don't need to bother finding a partner.
Hannah visits London Zoo to meet a fierce komodo dragon named Ganas, the result of a virgin birth. And Adam meets some tiny bdelloid rotifers, microscopic worm-like females who have survived for 50 million years by cloning themselves.
You can send your questions in to curiouscases@bbc.co.uk
Presenters: Hannah Fry, Adam Rutherford Producer: Michelle Martin.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Dr Adam Rutherford. And I'm Dr Hannah Fry. And you are going to send us your everyday |
| 0:10.8 | mysteries. And we are going to investigate them using the power of science. Science. |
| 0:16.5 | I like it. Hello, Curios. Series 9. Woo-woo-woo. Yes, it deserves two whoops. |
| 0:29.6 | I'm going to train noise. How are you, Dr Fry? I'm absolutely delighted to have made it to |
| 0:33.8 | series 9. I'm telling you that for free. I know. And then we're starting with a massive bang as |
| 0:38.2 | well, a two-parter on sex. Are you trying to pun already? I don't know what you're talking about. |
| 0:44.0 | The question came from Akirae from Leeds, Roberts. And we'll get to the specifics of the question |
| 0:49.7 | in the program itself. But there's an additional, which we didn't quite get in there. |
| 0:53.8 | Yes, he said, I am an avid science fiction reader. And there have been many attempts to describe aliens |
| 0:59.0 | with multiple genders. But do we have any evidence to support this actual actually working? |
| 1:04.2 | Now, this is a mistake that I made actually a few times during the interviews of this program. |
| 1:07.8 | Gender and sex are different things and we're talking about sex. We are specifically talking about sex. |
| 1:14.5 | Genetic stuff. How males and females and other types of sexes might already exist in nature. |
| 1:21.3 | And as you can imagine, dear listeners, I have had a long day of telling Adam that he cannot put |
| 1:29.0 | puns into this program. I think, well, a couple slipped in. |
| 1:36.7 | Now, we know that we have a lot of family listeners of parents who listen together with their |
| 1:42.4 | children to this program. And we thought about having maybe a parental warning on this, but actually, |
| 1:48.0 | I think that there's nothing in this program that you wouldn't find in a textbook of a biology |
| 1:53.4 | lesson at school, one of those, you know, slightly awkward ones, let's be honest, but nothing |
| 1:58.1 | beyond that. Is that your warning? No, that's me talking to you. No, I agree. I agree. Well, you know, |
| 2:03.2 | in many ways, the study of evolution, the study of genetics is trying to understand how reproduction |
| 2:07.9 | works and how inheritance works and those two things are facilitated in most animals by sex. |
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