YouSaid · the spoken record

Lixing Sun

lines on the record: 29
first: 2026-04-02
most recent: 2026-04-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The message is that sex is a far more complex issue than reproduction. Sex for reproduction is the most simplistic understanding. Since there has been sex on earth, everything has changed. And it's from reproduction to indirect reproduction to break down the genome, the genes, the genetic communities. And then as a result, you have all sorts of newer strategies, structures arising, adding the kind of vast amount of diversity. And I believe sex, once it was created, it gains its own life. Sometimes beyond control, I think sex has its own life. About it, probably I will write another book about this complex chaotic rose sex has been played in our natural world. So I would say, well, in the future we will understand a lot more of sex and keep an open mind and be ready for new surprises from scientific discoveries in the future.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's my idea about gender adaptivity. Gender development is adaptive. You assess the condition. You cannot change your sex on being male or female. But however, you can change the roles associated with being a male and a female. And that is gender. So you can pick up some of the typical female features or you pick up some of the typical male features while being the opposite sex. So gender gives us the flexibility to adjust to a changing, unpredictable conditions.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the invertebrates, your body is getting more complex and your body adapted to other factors such as eating out a living by fighting out your own space of niche and compete more effectively so your body gets more complex but at the same time as a side effect or probably inevitable you lose the flexibility of switching back to asexual reproduction so you got stuck in sexual reproduction I think that's that's the reason why it's so it's so much rarer in vertebraizing complex organisms that you don't find that they can flip flop around”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is surprising common in smaller, simpler organisms such as aphids, such as Daphne, water fleece and these organisms and many others as well, the smaller, more simplistic organisms, it's a flip-floppers quite common because asexual reproduction gives them efficiency. They can reproduce very quickly, expand very quickly. And for everybody who has a garden, typically you have aphids all over because they undergo asexual reproduction from spring to fall to autumn very, very quickly. But when winter comes, they switch back. This is such a perfect solution in invertebrates. Most of them cannot do that. Nowadays, they have found these reproduction 80 or more species invertebrates.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just the two sides of same coin. Eventually everything conflict or cooperation you have to be moderated by how successful your reproduction is. If cooperation is better, cooperate. If conflict is better, well, conflict. So they are the same, different size of the same coin. So that's the reason the behavior patterns can be so diverse because the situations are different. Conditions are different. So that's exactly we look at the evolutionarily different strategies in different ways. And they turn out to be, well, yeah, they are the different sides of the same coin.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“gene or paternogene are often shuts off the effect of the gene from the other party. So that confidence is always existing. Sometimes they call it intralocus conflict or sometimes called interlocutors conflict. It's the jargons could be very, very complex, but the genetic conflict reflects the interest conflict between males and females. So that's widely existing.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But this is well known. But nowadays, what is less well known is that even the genes are conflict as well. And genes that are good for the female may not be good for the male. So they actually fight for their own interest. And that falls very nicely with Doggin's selfish gene theory. And the one particular thing that has been discovered since the 1990s by mainly led by the Harvard biologist David Haig and he found that, well, the effect of the genes from mothers and the fathers could fight with each other. It matters whether a gene is expressed versus not expressed. So in the children, the maternal”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah the sexual conflict is based on the conflict of interest. What is good for male is not necessarily good for female and vice versa. So there is always this conflict around whenever there is a conflict of interest. I mean the fitness interest. This also speaks for why the monogamy is rare in animals. Monogamy is rare. Monogamy is a fine balance when the males and female interests coincide. But most of the time they don't. So you have conflict of interest.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's another major discovery in recent decades. They found in Nordica countries based on the church held statistics data. And they look into that, they found among these fraternal trinks. The women or the daughter or the female sibling tended to be less likely to get married. And if they do, if they did, because it's past the historical data, if they did, they had fewer offspring. So apparently they were masculinized by the embryos by their male siblings, the anogens during embryonic development.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you don't need to reproduce directly and lots of birds, for example. It has been found more than 300 birds spend the first year as a dog in helping their appearance to raise their younger chicks and in these bees and wasps and ants. 30,000 species. And one of the most successful animals, vast number of individuals do not reproduce. I mean, more than 95%. Of these individuals as workers or warriors without reproducing. And the reproductive organs never mature, but they basically cash in the indirect reproductive success by delegating the reproductive role to the queen.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, it became to be self serving, it's individualized genes. So now you could see things will be totally different. Now to make the most copious genes in the future, you can reproduce directly, or you can help your relatives to reproduce, that is hint selection developed by Bill Hamilton. And what was popularized actually by Richard Dawkins himself. So you can reproduce directly or you can help your genetic relatives to reproduce successfully as long as you can promote the most copies of genes. In the future. Now, the game is totally changed.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Genes work together to be the best in terms of passing down their genes to the future. But once sexual reproduction is involved, now the game totally changed because every time the genes are being distributed to different communities, different genomes. So the genes gain freedom. These genes gain freedom. They don't have to cooperate with others. Cooperation is one thing. They can do other nasty things, such as cheating, such as even killing of other genes for their own interest. And that's the idea of Dawkins, the selfish gene. Now this genes can become to be selfish.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The interesting thing about sex is that, well, you can reproduce directly. But because of sexual reproduction, you don't need to reproduce directly. Because in that kind of situation, most people do not realize when you have, you can reproduce in terms of finding another gamete. But however, the sex breaks down the genome every time the genes of one sex or individual is actually associated with genes from another individual. And every time it reproduces like that. So basically, in comparison with asexual reproduction, you do not have change in the genome, sort of like, as I talked about, you are stuck in the champion team. You try to do the best, right? In the champion team, all these”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because actually, evolution does. And then you look at the Chicana, for example, eight species of Jacana in the world, Jacana birds. These are water birds. Sometimes they call Jesus Christ bird because they can walk on the lily pads. It feels like they are walking on the water. But you look at the Jacana, seven out of eight species with the general rose are totally reversed. Males, or still females lay eggs, females, right? Males produce sperm. Males make nests. Males hatch eggs. Males take care of the chicks. While females goof around and protecting a territory containing several males with very little investment. So you could see the male and female the traditional human centric male and female roles are totally reversed. That's the changing gender, but not changing sex.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Involved in the change of producing eggs or sperm, but the roast can change. The typical stereotypical, especially human-centric views of being a feminine gender versus massacre. So I think much of it is not only sociological or social roles, but also related to human perception of being weathered.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this clownfish and also in some of others like swamp eels, they change sexes. The males could change into females by producing either sperm or egg. In clownfish, of course, when they are small, they started as male. And when they grow up to the top of the hierarchy, they switch into female. From spoon producing male to egg producing female, and that is biological sex. Gender is different, gender, you do not change sex, is still the same, but the rose, the structures associated with these rows being performing as a more masculine or feminine or taking the kind of different roles with a change. And there's gender.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We both know that biological sex is defined by the gametes produced. Small gametes, male, large gametes, female. So males produce from females producing eggs. So that's a biological consensus. At least most of us agree with that. But gender is different. Gender does not have a clear biological definition. It's more about social definition currently, but I tried in my book. I try to make gender as comprehensible as well. But sex and gender are connected. So I don't know where sex ends and gender starts, but sex and gender are two very different concepts. If sex is defined based on the size of gametes produced, gender is not. So let me give you an example.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they are useless, except the go nets only produce, use the go nads to produce firm and sort of like a living sperm factory and they can provide on call for females when females lay eggs so they release a sperm. So these are the most fascinating group of animals where males go a long way to find females.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the bottom of the sea or ocean, there are about 200 species. And the interesting thing about that is it's because it's totally dark. It's difficult for males to find females. So the males are very small. Probably about one 10% of the female body size, probably even smaller. But it's so difficult for males to find the females. They swim around and once they detect the female around, they bit into the female's body and then fuse their body circulatory system blood vessels with the females. So as to get the nutrients from the female being a parasite on the female as well. And in the meantime, their eyes degenerate. Their fins get lost, and their internal organs got reabsorbed into the body.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, I have not written into this book as Angular Fish. Angular fish, the deep sea fish, that there are about 200 species. The reason I did not write into this book is because in my previous book, I talked about the angle of fish, about the lasso nature book. So I think, well, let's let my readers have some more diversity. So anglerfish are the deep sea fish. They live in”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. It's in agriculture, monoculture, chasing for the highest yield is dangerous because lack of genetic diversity once you have a pathogen strikes and then things like that could happen. Actually, even today, in some of the highly productive banana plantations and rice. Rice breeze as well, and they also suffer these pathogens. So diversity is important.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's correct. It's named after the geneticist by the name of Herman Joseph Miller, who was from the famous flight lab run by Thomas Hunter Morgan.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the idea is behind it the red green hypothesis, which is based on the classical book by Louise Carroll, Alice in the Wonderland. Basically, it is the arms race between parasites and hosts. For both of them, they needed to try to stay one step up on the other because it's a dynamic change. Parasites are most successful the hosts will go down. When hosts are most successful and the parasites will go down, so it's a dynamics and it's dynamic arms race. So that is so-called the rather queen is about. In this arms race, one party tried to stay above the other and vice versa. One way to do so is by generating the genetic diversity. Without genetic diversity, you cannot stay in this game. Because everyone would be devout or everyone would die without being able to survive the change of the other side. It's sort of like a play chess.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's the one. The second one is that while you have genetic diversity, and that is a natural solution to fighting against a parasites and pathogens, which is everywhere in nature, without genetic diversity, there is no way you could do that easily. So I think these are the two reasons for males to be around and evolve successfully.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing is a very interesting question. I've been asked, in terms of efficiency, males are useless indeed, but males are around for a reason. So for asexual reproduction, the efficiency is high. You have one female, or let's call it female, but basically an asexual individual, one individual becomes two and two becomes four. And four becomes eight and all the way and the growth will be exponential. So it goes fast. But if you undergo sexual reproduction, now there's a problem. Every generation, you have to produce male and the female. So basically at least half of your energy iste or material is wasted on producing males. But males are around for a reason. One reason is that well. Could produce genetic diversity, which you could counter the accumulation of bad mutations in the asexual lineage.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you think about it that we have pretty much because you are in this field as well for the last three decades breakthroughs in the study of the original sex and sex development and sexual selection pretty much major breakthroughs every week if not every day published in major scientific journals and that part of information has not much of it has not sink into the public understanding yet”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To have a clear scientific understanding as to the state of the art information so that we can be more objective, more constructive instead of taking sides very quickly with very old information. These are the two motivations for this book.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are two one is that since nineteen ninety four, when Meridley published his book Bestseller, The Red Queen, there has not been an overwritten book and sort of with also some materials surrounding the topic of sex, sex development and sexual selection that has not been written for the gender audience for more than three decades. So I think that is the first motivation. The second motivation is that you look at today's debate about sex and gender, there are so many confusion, so much confusion, so many misconceptions around. I think it's better for us.”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorenti. Before sex evolved on our planet two billion years ago all reproduction happened asexually. So why and how did sexual reproduction evolve? On today's episode, Dr. Li Xing Sung joins Dr. Ganesh Taylor to explore the biological advantages of sexual reproduction, the differences between sex and gender and the variety of ways in which our planet is populated. Together they discuss the fascinating, varied and complex ways reproduction happens across the natural world, from whiptail lizards capable of immaculate conception to clownfish and bearded dragons who regularly switch gender roles. Let's join our host, Dr Ganesh Taylor, now with more. Welcome to Intelligence Squared. Ganesh Taylor, Chancer's Fellow at the Centre for Our guest today”
2026-04-02 · Intelligence Squared · How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT