Sex is a whole lot less rigidly male and female than you might think.
Many flowering plants have flowers with both male and female parts.
Others have separate male and female flowers on the same plant. Some
have male and female flowers on separate plants. Some have a mix of
bisexual and unisexual flowers on each plant. Among plant species that
have separate male and female specimens, it is not usually a case of X
and Y chromosomes as in mammals, though that does exist in some
species. Don't forget, too, that the sporophyte generation of a
moss, fern, liverwort, or flowering plant has no gender at all. Also
many species eschew sex almost completely, reproducing entirely
vegetatively or clonally.
Many animal species are funny sexwise as well--change sex during
lifetime (certain fish) , reproduce without males (aphids), have
gender determined by incubation temperature (crocodilians), are
hermaphrodites (slugs and worms), or reproduce asexually (flatrworms,
etc.)
Don't even get started on fungi, where there's no male and female per
se, just different complementary strains of the same species.
Microbes and algae...well, they do all sorts of different things, some
of which are just plain weird. And what about that little goober they
found living on lobster lips--it reproduces by dissolving its own guts
and rearranging them as young, splitting open and dying to release
them. I tell you, SF writers have not yet come up with much that
nature hasn't thought of.
I suspect it's not so much male and female that nature is after, but a
continuous mixup of genetic material. Asexually reproducing entities
can skip even that.
M. Reed
Texas A&M
Elaine Jackson wrote:
Animal species have male and female specimens, and so do plants. Do plants and
animals have a common ancestor that already had specimens of male and female
gender? Does sexual terminology mean something completely different when applied
to plants as opposed to animals? TIA
Peace
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˙WPC5
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