Which evolved first - the male or the female.?

Question

There is this unresolved question about the sequence of the evolution of the chicken and the egg, but what is really bothering me is about the gender. Did the male evolve before the female or was it the other way round? At what point did the male decide a female has to evolve or at what point did the female decide the male has to evolve?

Answer 1

all what i want to say is ... don't be bothered .. it is not an important issue to think about ..

think about God .. he is the way of your life .. nothin' else .. !!!!

did you pray this morning .. did you talk with your father .. GoD

Answer 2

The issue here is that you are trying to look at an evolutionary sequence of specimens and say that one particular one is species A and the next B. If you want to insist on a clear defining line, then the matter of gender order is irrelevant. B can still reproduce with A, and the more B-like children's decendants will eventually reach the same state as B (assuming that the selective pressures are consistent).
(Note that I interpreted your question as "did the male or the female of a given species develop first".)

And a side comment on the chicken and the egg:
If you define a chicken as an animal with a particular genetic fingerprint, then you get the following result. Consider the first chicken. It came from an egg, which certainly must be defined as a chicken egg. What about the parents? Each parent contributed DNA which created the chicken, but according to your definition are not proper chickens. So the egg came first.

Answer 3

Both genders would have evolved in parallel with each other as they are the same species. You talk of evolution as if is a dramatic sudden thing. Evolution is an incredibly slow process which first occurs with changes undetectable except at the celllular level. These then develop into more noticeable changes.

It is likely that our universal common ancestor did not have gender and reproduced asexually. At some point different members of the species began to diversify to become male and female, and sexual reproduction began. This must have happened over the course of many generations and would have happened at the same time. It is even possible that the UCA were hermaphrodites and some lost their female genitailia and some their male, leaving them as distinct genders.

Answer 4

Female. The female of some species sometimes do not need a male to fertilize their eggs. This is known as parthenogenesis. In fact, with developments in genetic engineering we can now make a woman pregnant without a male sperm. The male has the disadvantage that he has no womb and is a dead-end as far as reproduction is concerned. It is interesting then to surmise why the male evolved. Presumably, the female wanted more than just to reproduce.

Some mentioned the Bible in this context. Actually, according to Talmudic traditions, the first person was probably androgynous - both male and female. Differentiation came after the Fall.

Answer 5

Male and female gonads (reproductive organs) were first situated in the same individual. But nature was careful in avoiding self fertilization. So two individual has to come together to exchange/release gametes. The evolutionary process later separated the male and female by allowing only one type of gonad to develop in an individual. So the male and female were formed at the same time not one after the other. One can not exist or reproduce without the other. Of course there are exceptions. Some produce individuals through parthenogenesis, some through budding, some through binary fission. However, these are additional facilities as they also have sexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction allows mixing up of genetic material through which changes are brought about in the offspring. Addition or deletion of characters leads to evolution. Evolution is nothing but descend with changes. Only sexual reproduction can achieve this. Otherwise it will be like cloning; all the individuals produced will be identical. Back to gender- both are simultaneous formed.

Answer 6

Not my field, but from what I understand female (ish) first that self replicated. This however, is inefficient in evolutionary terms and probably explains why it took about 3 billion years to get past single celled organisms. The next step was probably female (ish) hermaphrodites that could self replicate and swap genetic information. As evolution depends on favourable mutations, if one occurs that benefits an organism this is replicated and becomes the norm. The male Y chromosome is possibly a mutated female X chromosome. As yet why many organisms divide into sexes (why just 2? etc.) is not understood but it must have offered an advantage over what proceeded it.
There was no decision to change or create two (or more) sexes it was more like an automatic upgrade from one state of evolution to another.
All this talk of evolution will be a red rag to a bull for the creationists who monitor this science site to peddle their religious clap-trap but science cannot have all the answers as in retrospect we only have part of the evidence. We don't base our thought on a few chapters of some untestable bronze age myths but on the constant updating and reassessing of testable evidence.

Answer 7

I'm sure you'll get all sorts of "interesting" answers to this question, so I'll chime in with my own: genders didn't evolve separately, because they're not separate species. Rather, genders would have arisen at the same time within a given species. What probably happened was that first you had organisms capable of fertilizing themselves, then organisms that were capable of fertilizing themselves AND others, then organisms that were only capable of fertilizing others, then genders.

I could be wrong, and I realize that's not a great deal of detail, but it's a start. Good luck to you.

Answer 8

Are you talking about male/female humans or on an organismal field? If the latter, then asexual reproduction came first, then reproduction in which "female" could self fertilize or reproduce without "males", but if you're talking about humans, it was a slow evolution, but the species evolved at the same time.

Answer 9

Females. Well, it depends on how you define female. If you define female as the one capable of giving birth than it's definitely the female first.

Early haploid organisms would have been able to recombine with any other member of its species. You can either call these females or hermaphrodites, though female is probably more accurate. Eventually, sexual dimorphism begins to occur, and separate sexes arise (and let's call them males).

Answer 10

Do not know the exact point but we are male and female when we are in the womb b4 we find out if we want be male or female there i 4 mths of no sexual genda identity so me thinks the chick decided to b a chick when she knew the cck needed to produce r race

Answer 11

Neither, but Adam was *created* before Eve.

The notion that mankind evolved from some ape-like ancestor is pure baloney.
The fossil evidence (the sum total of all hominid fossils would fit on just one small table) indicates that there are people and there are apes. And nothing in between.

Just ask any evolutionist for the evidence of human evolution. I don't just mean the pretty displays in the museums - I mean show us the actual evidence!

Otherwise stop promoting your bigoted religious views as science.