Posted on 07/30/2003 8:56:08 AM PDT by I_dmc
Birds do it, bees do it, humans do it - but nobody knows why sex evolved at all, the world congress of genetics heard in Melbourne today.
"The evolution of sex has presented a paradox to evolutionary biology for over a century," said Associate Professor Sally Otto, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, to delegates attending the 19th International Congress of Genetics.
"It's known there are a lot of costs to reproducing sexually. Why make sons and males, if you could just produce females that were able to reproduce by themselves? That's a division of resources into two sexes that seems unnecessary," she said.
Not only does this seem to waste resources, the whole process is prone to failure. There's the risk of not finding a mate, and the risk of getting a disease during mating. There's also a more subtle risk: if an individual reaches reproduction age and finds a mate, it is a successful genotype - a tried and true model of a species. But then that individual mixes their genotype with a mate, with no guarantee that the mixture is going to be any better.
(Excerpt) Read more at abc.net.au ...
Why do these mutations always seem to move a species forward? What drives the mutations?
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