There's rarely an "evolutionary reason" for a trait not developing. Wings would certainly be a net benefit to mice survival-wise; but unless there's a strong evolutionary pressure for such a trait to develop, it's unlikely to appear.
It's the same for asexual reproduction: unless there's a strong advantage for a species to reproduce asexually, it's likely not going to appear.
In other words, evolutionary selection is really about the strict minimum needed for a species' population to thrive; evolution selects, but it doesn't optimize.
You also have to account for things that are hard to predict: even though on paper it seems like asexual reproduction would lead to a higher chance of propagating genes, perhaps in reality the lack of diversity in the resulting offspring would be negative to the species' survival (or while it sounds like mice developing wings would be an advantage, in reality the energy needed to develop wings would make it a survival disadvantage).
An interesting case were these rules are "suspended" are in closed ecosystems where certain species have no predators and plenty of sustenance; e.g. paradise birds in pacific islands, which can develop completely superfluous feather patterns and attributes at no evolutionary "cost".
I was under the (perhaps wrong) impression that asexual reproduction predated sexual reproduction in the history of life (prokaryotes predating eukaryote?) so I always thought that organisms "lost" the trait of asexual reproduction somewhere down the line. Probably an assumption without basis.
>>perhaps in reality the lack of diversity in the resulting offspring would be negative to the species' survival.
Yes. I imagine the answer would be something like that, but the question of what is the exact reason still stands.
Like i said I haven't the foggiest idea of the subject matter but always liked to think and speculate about it. Origin and Nature of Life, Physical nature of consciousness and Neuroscience in general are all topics I find fascinating. If anybody know any popular science books they can recommend on any of these topics, it would be great.
Yes, you are right that life originally started as asexual reproduction and sexual reproduction appeared later; my answer was more about the likelihood of a species that already reproduces sexually moving towards asexual reproduction.
Regarding the question of why the asexual->sexual shift happened in the first place, the wikipedia article on asexual reproduction has this to say:
Current hypotheses [2] suggest that asexual reproduction may have short term benefits when rapid population growth is important or in stable environments, while sexual reproduction offers a net advantage by allowing more rapid generation of genetic diversity, allowing adaptation to changing environments.
No, that's a hot research topic.
E.g. a popular hypothesis is than in an RNA world very early and simple organisms had inefficient metabolism and error-prone genetic copy. They didn't have enough energy to sustain a backup of their genetic information, RNA is not very stable, etc. So the only way to keep functioning was to constantly mate with other organisms and exchange good replacements for broken genes.
These topics are truly fascinating. Many seem to consider them 'soft' compared to Physics, but in some ways, I find some of the questions involved at least as deep and fundamental (or even more) as those currently being asked in the Physics discipline.
A lot of animals are social. In that case, finding a mate of the opposite sex is not really a problem. In a herd of cows, or a flock of birds, there will be both males and females. Animals that don't live in groups often have mating calls or attractive scents, or various other ways of attracting a mate.
And then there's organisms that just do reproduce asexually when necessary, like the snakes in the article. Or like grass, which only reproduces sexually when it gets long enough to "go to seed" and otherwise just spreads asexually.
The question of why sexual reproduction exists at all is a very deep question in evolutionary theory. You shouldn't feel bad about asking it, because a lot of people have, and come up with some very different answers. The Red Queen is an interesting book about this topic.