Epistemic background: I studied bioinformtics a decade ago. More recently I played around with an evolutionary simulation to attempt to get it to recreate hunter gatherer lifespan patterns and was surprised about how little prior art there is. But I’m not read up on all current discourse on evolution.
Sex allows two populations of a species to combine their genes in a way that results in the species getting roughly the best versions of the genes from both populations. Asexual bacteria do something similar by passing plasmides around but that strategy doesn’t work for multicellular organisms and likely also not for one-celled organism that most of the time aren’t in proximity to other members of their species.
If you have millions of individuals of a species, a species that has a way to combine the best genes from multiple organisms is going to develop new benefitial genes much faster then a species that doesn’t have a mechanism for gene exchange.
The current estimates I can find for the amount of mice in the world is even bigger at 20 billion which results in even bigger gains from being able to combine genes across the population.
I expect that there are mostly two sexes because you don’t get additional gains by introducing more then two. I’m not quite sure what you mean with sex being stable.
How would horizontal transfer even work when you go from a prokariot with millions of base pairs of genetic material to a eukariot with billions of base pairs and all the complexity of RNA splicing?
Sex being stable i.e. lack of gender switching or hermaphrodites in most animals (with exceptions ala snails).
Also, the recombinant benefits seems like they could also come by via increased varrisnce from e.g. mutation and ‘survival of the fittest’ style mechanism.
Epistemic background: I studied bioinformtics a decade ago. More recently I played around with an evolutionary simulation to attempt to get it to recreate hunter gatherer lifespan patterns and was surprised about how little prior art there is. But I’m not read up on all current discourse on evolution.
Sex allows two populations of a species to combine their genes in a way that results in the species getting roughly the best versions of the genes from both populations. Asexual bacteria do something similar by passing plasmides around but that strategy doesn’t work for multicellular organisms and likely also not for one-celled organism that most of the time aren’t in proximity to other members of their species.
If you have millions of individuals of a species, a species that has a way to combine the best genes from multiple organisms is going to develop new benefitial genes much faster then a species that doesn’t have a mechanism for gene exchange.
The current estimates I can find for the amount of mice in the world is even bigger at 20 billion which results in even bigger gains from being able to combine genes across the population.
I expect that there are mostly two sexes because you don’t get additional gains by introducing more then two. I’m not quite sure what you mean with sex being stable.
How would horizontal transfer even work when you go from a prokariot with millions of base pairs of genetic material to a eukariot with billions of base pairs and all the complexity of RNA splicing?
Sex being stable i.e. lack of gender switching or hermaphrodites in most animals (with exceptions ala snails).
Also, the recombinant benefits seems like they could also come by via increased varrisnce from e.g. mutation and ‘survival of the fittest’ style mechanism.