The costs and benefits of sex: new insights from old asexual lineages

Discussions that are aimed at understanding the maintenance of sexual reproduction are in a bit of a quagmire owing to the many competing theories that have been proposed. Also, one of the central observations — that asexual lineages are typically short lived — still needs to be properly quantified. Exciting new results on ancient asexual organisms show that lineages can persist for many millions of generations without recombination. Understanding how they do so might well provide crucial new insights into the problem of sex.