On 11/3/2015 2:30 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Tue, Nov 03, 2015 at 02:05:53PM -0800, Brent Meeker wrote:
Biological theory says that sexual reproduction should halve the
fitness of the organism as compared with asexual (or parthenogenetic)
reproduction, so asexual reproduction should be the norm (as it is in
bacteria).
But does it halve the reproductive chances of a gene; or does it
give it more chances of survival?
Halves it, because its a 50/50 lottery whether the gene from the
female or the gene from the male is expressed in the offspring.
But that's for one child. When sexual reproduction evolved the number
of offspring for most organisms was in the thousands, so a given gene
probably had many chances to combine with different genes from the other
gender.
Brent
Of course, the same logic would indicate that incest should be very
evolutionary advantageous - which gives a potent clue as to what's
going on.
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