THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



180 



"reproduce" or "duplicate" without sex. But without it 

 there would be little or no variation, heredities could not 

 be mixed, unexpected combinations could not arise, and 

 evolution would either never have taken place at all or, 

 at least, taken place so slowly that we might all still be 

 arthropods or worse. 



If in both the plant and animal kingdom many organ- 

 isms are actually abandoning the whole of the sexual proc- 

 ess, that is apparently because they have resigned their 

 interest in change and its possibilities. Everyone^ knows 

 how the ants and the bees have increased the single- 

 minded efficiency of the worker majority by depriving 

 them of a sexual function and then creating a special class 

 of sexual individuals. But their solution is far less radical 

 than that of many of the small creatures, including many 

 insects, some of whom are making sexless rather than sex- 

 ual reproduction the rule, and some of whom are appar- 

 ently dispensing with the sexual entirely so that no male 

 has ever been found. 



In the plant world one of the most familiar and success- 

 ful of all weeds produces its seeds without pollinization, 

 despite the fact that it still retains ,the flower which was 

 developed long ago as a mechanism for facilitating that 

 very sexual process which it has now given up. That it is 

 highly "successful" by purely biological standards no' one 

 who has ever tried to eliminate dandelions from a lawn is 

 likely to doubt. As I have said before, they not only get 

 along very well in the world, they have also been astonish- 

 ing colonizers here, since the white man unintentionally 

 brought them from Europe, probably in hay. Sexless 

 though the dandelion is, it is inheriting the earth, and the 

 only penalty which it has to pay for its sexlessness is the 



