Flowering plants: the paradox of the success of separate sexes.
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Flowering plants having separate sexes are rare, whereas this is the rule in
most animal species. Recent studies in plants showed that dioecious groups
(where sexes are separated) are on average species poorer than their
hermaphroditic sister groups, whereas they have evolved for the same time since
their common ancestor, suggesting that dioecy could be an evolutionary dead-end.
Jos Käfer and Sylvain Mousset, from the [Sex and Evolution->https://lbbe.univ-lyon1.fr/-Equipe-Sexe-et-Evolution-.html] group, have detected and corrected a statistical bias in this method,
commonly used in evolutionary biology. Their article was published in Systematic
Biology. This new method was applied to a dataset that was obtained through a
collaboration with botanists of the Oslo University. The new results no longer
support the evolutionary dead-end hypothesis. They were published in the Journal
of Evolutionary Biology (special issue on the evolution of sex).
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