March 30, 2005
WHO MAKES CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS LOOK WILD AND CRAZY?
Why sex is good for the species (Bjorn Carey, MSNBC, March 31th, 2005)
Sex is an expensive and risky business. It steals time and drains precious nutrient resources. And each act of reproduction runs the risk of messing up carefully crafted genetic blueprints. So why do we do it?The answer might seem obvious to you. But it's not so clear to biologists who consider that despite a logical alternative — asexual reproduction by simple cloning without the help of a partner — sex is preferred in the wild.[...]
Scientists don't know how sex even got started. But they have long suspected that organisms prefer sex specifically because of the risk. The slight shuffling of genes produced through sexual reproduction may help organisms adapt more easily to a stressful or changing environment, the thinking goes.
We assume the stressful and changing environment is her family.
Posted by Peter Burnet at March 30, 2005 8:43 PMI thought this was pretty well explained by a book I read several years ago, "The Red Queen".
It's a constant shuffing to throw off parasite & diseases.
Posted by: ray at March 30, 2005 9:39 PMOr it could just be some random mutation that occurred relatively early in the evolutionary tangle that doesn't really effect survival much one way or another.
Or it could just be a gift from G-d. It does have that two-edged quality of all of His best gifts.
Posted by: David Cohen at March 31, 2005 7:35 AMThe study actually quantifies selection, which Orrin claims does not exist.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at April 1, 2005 1:29 AM