Abstract
Which conditions favour the evolution of hermaphroditism or separate sexes? One classical hypothesis states that an organism's mode of locomotion (if any) when searching for a mate should influence breeding system evolution. We used published phylogenies to reconstruct evolutionary changes in adult mate-search efficiency and breeding systems among multicellular organisms. Employing maximum-likelihood analyses, we found that changes in adult mate-search efficiency are significantly correlated with changes in breeding system, and this result is robust to uncertainties in the phylogenies. These data provide the first statistical support, across a broad range of taxa, for the hypothesis that breeding systems and mate-search efficiency did not evolve independently. We discuss our results in context with other causal factors, such as inbreeding avoidance and sexual specialization, likely to affect breeding system evolution.
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