How could the genders have evolved?

The ability to exchange genetic material was beneficial to survival.

"Wouldn't the different sexes have to have evolved at the exact same time with all the inner workings to make it all work together?"

No. You're assuming different "genders" is necessary at all.

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Either you get it and have changed your mind or you never wanted an answer in the first place. Which is it?

Because if you really wanted an answer and still didn't quite get it you would have asked a follow up.

1. The variety of life cycles is very great. It is not simply a matter of being sexual or asexual. There are many intermediate stages. A gradual origin, with each step favored by natural selection, is possible (Kondrashov 1997). The earliest steps involve single-celled organisms exchanging genetic information; they need not be distinct sexes. Males and females most emphatically would not evolve independently. Sex, by definition, depends on both male and female acting together. As sex evolved, there would have been some incompatibilities causing sterility (just as there are today), but these would affect individuals, not whole populations, and the genes that cause such incompatibility would rapidly be selected against.

2. Many hypotheses have been proposed for the evolutionary advantage of sex (Barton and Charlesworth 1998). There is good experimental support for some of these, including resistance to deleterious mutation load (Davies et al. 1999; Paland and Lynch 2006) and more rapid adaptation in a rapidly changing environment, especially to acquire resistance to parasites (Sá Martins 2000).

I don't know enough about the evolution of sex to answer your question. But I will say that it wouldn't take two separate mutations to create the two different sexes. From studying fetal development, we have learned that all babies start with the same basic genitalia, and those genitalia develop differently according to chromosome and hormonal promptings from the mother. For instance, it has been demonstrated that the clitoris is the same organ which becomes a penis on a male, and that the labia is the same organ which becomes a scrotum on a male (which is why, in intersexed individuals, they have found underdeveloped testes inside labial tissue).

This is one subject IJR is unfamialr with. According to Wikipedia:

The evolution of sexual reproduction is a major puzzle in modern evolutionary biology. Many groups of organisms, notably the majority of animals and plants, reproduce sexually. The evolution of sex contains two related, yet distinct, themes: its origin and its maintenance. However, since the hypotheses for the origins of sex are difficult to test experimentally, most current work has been focused on the maintenance of sexual reproduction. Several explanations have been suggested by biologists including W. D. Hamilton, Alexey Kondrashov, George C. Williams, Harris Bernstein, Carol Bernstein, Michael M. Cox, Frederic A. Hopf and Richard E. Michod to explain how sexual reproduction is maintained in a vast array of different living organisms.

The rest of the article is interesting. IJR recomends reading it.

it is somewhat much less complicated to comprehend if one is conscious how cells divide, particularly the chromosomes. each and each cellular has a pair of chromosomes. this implies genes are additionally paired. Genes are sections of DNA to blame for issues like hair coloration and ailment resistance. often times in basic terms one gene is totally useful, yet this would not rely through fact the cellular nevertheless works genetically. whilst cells divide without intercourse, each and all of the chromosomes mirror themselves and each and all of the genes assemble themselves in precisely an identical order. this implies new cells are same to the cells which generated them. in the time of sexual reproduction, the chromosomes separate, replica themselves yet do not reassemble. This leads to 4 new cells, not basically 2. each and all of the 4 cells has basically a million/2 the chromosomes as a typical cellular. those specific cells are called gametes and are what eggs and sperm (an pollen) are. whilst egg meets sperm or pollen, the two cells recombine their chromosomes. the state-of-the-artwork distinction between sexual and non-sexual reproduction is that sexually created organisms have not got an identical gene pairs through fact the dad and mom. If the egg and sperm the two had a undeniable non-functioning gene then this gene will by no skill show itself interior the offspring. organisms are extremely complicated and usually times there are advantages whilst genes get became off. An occasion is coloration. green bugs have a miles better threat of not getting eaten on green leaves than crimson bugs do. for this reason, crimson genes are suited whilst they don't show themselves. information this, that's elementary to work out that an elementary mutation would have led to the chromosomes to replica themselves two times and not pair up lower back yet replace into remoted in separate cells. This became the mechanism which allowed offspring to be diverse than their dad and mom. This in turn became how evolution itself began. .

Well, if you aren't one of those "See atheists are wrong" people then you might have wanted to post this in the Biology section.

I am not a biologist, but I'll give it a shot...

The first cells were asexually meaning they reproduced by themselves. Many species still do that today. Genders started occurring when the first cells began exchanging DNA. Those first cells would probably have had the ability to reproduce on their own and with other cells. Again, many species still do that today.

The idea of sexual reproduction is older than animals. Plants actually carry out a form of sexual reproduction (one doesn't have to have sex to reproduce "sexually"...you merely need 2 parents and 2 sets of genetic code)

But before plants, there were protoeukaryotes.

"The organisms in question (protoeukaryotes) could still reproduce by meiosis and sexual reproduction was just an option, but with the increase in atmospheric oxygen the pace of life increased and the organisms that reproduced sexually more often were better able to adapt and compete at the increased pace, so the older process of non-sexual selection actually evolved sexual reproduction as the best option for survival."

"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins

Then you're misunderstanding how such things evolve, I'm afraid. And I'm not particularly feeling up to writing a dissertation on it on here. Read practically any book on the evolution of life by Stephen J Gould or Richard Fortey.

Well the concept become less difficult when you take into account that a fetus starts off the same, that the initial build is the same, that certain parts are, well, just a different formation of original tissue that started the same...

There are some very good answers to this question. I recommend searching "sexual reproduction evolution" in the bar above. One of the answers I read was particularly good, but I cannot post the link, it seems.

EDIT: Wait, here it is:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AtsDp...