Positively negative evidence for asexuality

Abstract

No evidence of sexual reproduction has been detected in many eukaryotes, but this "negative evidence" of obligatory asexuality is still met with widespread skepticism. This is partly because obligatory asexual reproduction is deleterious in the long run and partly because it is logically possible that there are undetected sexual individuals. I point out that this skepticism stems from failure to think statistically, and the absence of sexual individuals in a sufficiently large sample can be very convincing evidence of obligatory asexuality. A survey of rotifer workers showed that approximately 458515 bdelloid rotifers have been examined without finding any males or hermaphrodites; applying the Poisson distribution to these data shows that the upper 95% confidence interval of the number of sexual individuals is less than 8.1 × 10-6. In darwinulid ostracods, a smaller sample puts the estimate at less than 1.75 × 10-4 sexual individuals. If there were undetected sexual individuals at these low levels, the frequency of outcrossing must be even lower; so that sex will be ineffective and easily lost. Furthermore, recently published evidence shows that these ancient asexuals are not "scandalous" but merely the tail end of the age distribution of asexual lineages. © 2010 The American Genetic Association. All rights reserved.