Which Came First, Male or Female?

People have argued for generations about which came first, the chicken or the egg. But evolution hides a stranger question in plain sight: which came first, male or female?The answer begins long before humans. Long before mammals. Long before animals as we know them.In Which Came First, Male or Female?, Felix Quarkweather follows one of biology’s strangest stories from ancient cells and primitive mating systems to the evolutionary split between large eggs and tiny sperm. Along the way, the book explores why sexual reproduction evolved at all, how biological sexes emerged from organisms that did not originally have them, and why nature repeatedly refuses to follow the simple diagrams we learned in school.Meet algae that illuminate crucial steps in the evolution of sex. Discover fungi with mating systems far stranger than ours. See how temperature can influence sexual development in some reptiles, why certain fish can change reproductive sex, how sex chromosomes evolved, and where humans finally enter a story billions of years older than humanity itself.Written for curious readers rather than specialists, this compact popular-science journey combines evolutionary biology, genetics, zoology, and a healthy amount of humor without sacrificing the science.By the end, the original question has an unexpectedly elegant answer.Neither came first. Sex came before the sexes.