Yes. When responding to the question, “Is sex necessary for reproduction?,” the answer while focusing only on mammals is a resounding “Yes.” Let’s leave the odd shark, plants, amoebas and other lower forms of life out of the discussion, as well as third-party actions like artificial insemination, laboratory manipulated mice, cloning, etc. Pure sexual reproduction by mammals requires two beings, one male and one female. According to all biology references on the subject that I Googled, there are no cases of naturally-occurring asexual mammal reproduction, none, not one.
Now that answer, “Yes,” being firmly established as valid in my mind, opens up a door of inquiry about the validity of some hypotheses associated with evolution theory. The principal thesis on how life began appears to be simplistically depicted as a mass of chemical elements and molecules in some primordial soup, over millions or billions of years of time, gradually designing themselves into a multiplicity of highly specific, integrated systems for sensing, moving, nourishing, self-healing, reproducing, and, for man, thinking, speaking, singing and even laughing.
Because of the “Yes” answer above, we can now deduce that there was not just a single design for the first true mammal in this chain of evolutionary events, but in fact there obviously had to be two separate, though synergistic interrelated designs, one for males and one for females, that had to evolve simultaneously. Otherwise, reproduction of each successive generation in the evolutionary chain could never have taken place.
While we all know the basic facts that, for mammals, females provide the eggs and males the sperm that kicks off the process leading to an embryo, we perhaps may have never taken the time to really consider the complexity of these two radically different yet interdependent systems of anatomical organs and internal plumbing so essential to this process. The utter dependence of the internal fertilization process on integration and actions of two differing reproductive anatomies, their multiple hormones and the concordant duet by two independent nervous systems is mind-bending.
Restating: At least for mammals, two simultaneous, separate though necessarily complementary configurations, not one, are mandatory if any species is to ultimately evolve from the primordial ancestral blobs! How does evolutionary theory accommodate this statistically outrageous complication?
