SEX is the ultimate absurdity. Forget the hormonal rushes, the sweat and the contorted posturing. Forget about the heartache, the flowers, the bad poems and the costly divorce, just think about the biology. It's nuts. Cloning makes far more sense.

A clone, after all, just quietly gets on with copying itself. And since every clone can produce more clones, cloning produces far more offspring. There is no need for males - a waste of space, as hard-line feminists and evolutionists agree.

All this made sex the "queen of evolutionary problems" in the 20th century, taxing some of the finest minds in biology. The issue isn't just explaining why almost all plants and animals engage in sex. It is also explaining why the life forms that ruled the planet for billions of years and remain by far the most abundant - the bacteria - manage fine without it.