In the context of sex maintenance, asexual reproduction has two main disadvantages:

• The deleterious mutation hypothesis proposes that sex exists to purge damaging genetic mutations from a species³.
• The chosen method to model this purging (models range from deterministic to stochastic⁴) largely determines if the hypothesis holds true.
• The mutation rate must be high enough so that a clone's genetic costs outweigh its productivity for the deleterious mutation hypothesis to hold true. The cost of sexual reproduction can easily exceed the benefits⁵.

• All members of an asexual population will have the same defensive alleles against parasites.