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 ...
Not if both parteners are virgins when they marry.
Not if both parteners are virgins when they marry.
LOL...very good!
Actually....more scorn from absolutely drop dead gorgeous women who have had issues with wardaddy because he was a "bad boy".
Now, I'm middle aged with many children and a lovely wife and that is all from someone else's life....but the sins of the father do revisit...terrifyingly....especially with lovely teenaged daughters. G-d knew all he had to do was wait.
Well let's put it to the test shall we? Does one need to be baptized (immersed) in water to be saved? (I shant hold my breath for a response...)
This happened after they were expelled. *Ahem*
Three ladies were walking down the street when they found a lamp. So one of the ladies rubs it and a genie pops out. "I will grant each of you one wish, and only one wish." So the ladies were thinking long and hard when the first lady says "I got it! I would like to be extremely smart."{POOF} This lady can read the dictionary like it was nothing, spell any word, and do math within seconds. The other two girls were amazed...so the second lady says "I want to be two times smarter than my friend."{POOF} Now the second lady was two times smarter than the first...she could speak five other languages, found the formula for nuclear fusion, and explain everything about our DNA. Totally blown away, the third lady says that she has it "I want to be two times smarter than both my friends put together."{POOF} She turns into a man. :)
But why was that required? The first single-celled organisms didn't have intercourse to reproduce, did they? And yet they somehow 'evolved' into something else at some point. The question is then, why did they later evolve into creatures that reproduced via intercourse? What was the purpose? And what factors specifically caused the evolution of two sexes?
Please tell me, what are the most plentiful life forms on the planet. Are they not single-celled creatures who do not use intercourse for reproduction?
So how is that method of reproduction not successful?
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he'd learned in seven years."
:o)
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he'd learned in seven years."
:o)
I got tired of all the druling (sp?) over the picture of Bush in a flight suit. In the tag line the arrow points to me and describes me. I do look a whole lot better in a flight suit than a french maid's outfit. The only drawback to that tagline is that the single freepettes here have not taken the hint and jumped on these old bones . . .
Yup. So how is that method of reproduction not successful?
If you consider biological success as topping out at being a single-cell life form, you've got a point. I'd flip it around as evidence that asexual reproduction works for simple life forms, but higher life forms require something more. The mutation into separate sexes permitted more genetic variation, and so massively accelerated the evolutionary process for those particular life forms. Personally, I'd consider humanity a pretty good biological success.
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