The biological significance of sexual reproduction means different things to evolutionists than it does to creationists. To the evolutionist it means increased access to diversity in the genome. To creationists it means reproduction of offspring (although increased genetic diversity is beneficial, but it is not the objective of the process.)  Evolutionists therefore look for processes that might have increased diversity in the ancient past, such as the movement of foreign DNA into victim/bacterial cells. Thus, these scientists consider phage infections, conjugation and transformation as possible forerunners of sexual reproduction.

Transformation is the penetration of genetic material in the environment into a bacterial cell. Conjugation is when two possibly very unrelated bacteria line up and become connected by a small conjugation tube. A small ring of genetic material (a plasmid) moves from the one cell into the other. It is through conjugation that bacterial cells have acquired immunity to antibiotics and other capabilities.  Phage viruses have fancy talents for injecting their DNA into a host bacterial cell. The incoming genetic material commandeers the cell’s systems and devotes it to producing more viruses.

None of these processes has anything to do with reproduction of the recipient cell, and the existence of a CRISPR firewall devoted to destroying incoming foreign genetic material demonstrates that the objective of the host/victim cell is to get rid of these invasions.  Restriction enzyme endonucleases also confer immunity to incoming genetic material to bacterial cells.