Admittedly, I haven’t read about the problem of sex since ’90s but back then the argument against the naive “sex is good because it allows all the good genes to get into a single organism” was that that made sense from the point of view of the species, but not necessarily from the point of view of the individual—while the natural selection works on the individual level.
In particular, when a female has a choice to reproduce either sexually or via parthenogenesis, in the former case she loses 50% of the fitness (because half of her genes get recombined out). Thus, the advantages of the sexual reproduction must outweight this huge drop in fitness. Even worse, it must outweight it quickly. “Your progeny is going to be better off after 100 generations” is not going to work, because when your fitness drops by 50% you’ll die out in few generations.
Anyway, if the newer research found a solution to this problem, it would be interesting to hear about it.
Admittedly, I haven’t read about the problem of sex since ’90s but back then the argument against the naive “sex is good because it allows all the good genes to get into a single organism” was that that made sense from the point of view of the species, but not necessarily from the point of view of the individual—while the natural selection works on the individual level.
In particular, when a female has a choice to reproduce either sexually or via parthenogenesis, in the former case she loses 50% of the fitness (because half of her genes get recombined out). Thus, the advantages of the sexual reproduction must outweight this huge drop in fitness. Even worse, it must outweight it quickly. “Your progeny is going to be better off after 100 generations” is not going to work, because when your fitness drops by 50% you’ll die out in few generations.
Anyway, if the newer research found a solution to this problem, it would be interesting to hear about it.