Not quite sure where this would fit into your views. A numbers of years back I came across an article about snails. Those that lived below of certain depth of water were unisex—self replicating. The same species of snail, when living in shallower waters displayed male and female and reproduction required the exchange of genetic materials as you mentioned.
The theory on why that was observed was at a certain depth the snails were not confronted with a lot of the diseases they faced in the shallower waters. Sharing the genetic code improved their ability to fight the diseases, IIRC.
On this picture, the claim is just that sex is worthwhile if it adds enough variance to make it worthwhile, so you could either reduce costs or increase variance.
(This picture could be wrong though, if the average of two organisms is just more fit on average than the parents and it’s not about variance at all.)
(This isn’t really affected by Wei Dai’s concern above.)
Not quite sure where this would fit into your views. A numbers of years back I came across an article about snails. Those that lived below of certain depth of water were unisex—self replicating. The same species of snail, when living in shallower waters displayed male and female and reproduction required the exchange of genetic materials as you mentioned.
The theory on why that was observed was at a certain depth the snails were not confronted with a lot of the diseases they faced in the shallower waters. Sharing the genetic code improved their ability to fight the diseases, IIRC.
On this picture, the claim is just that sex is worthwhile if it adds enough variance to make it worthwhile, so you could either reduce costs or increase variance.
(This picture could be wrong though, if the average of two organisms is just more fit on average than the parents and it’s not about variance at all.)
(This isn’t really affected by Wei Dai’s concern above.)