Dear Mr. Darwin: How is babby formed?
April 20, 2011 8:25 AM Subscribe
How did sexual reproduction become evolutionarily advantageous?
posted by AngerBoy to Science & Nature (23 answers total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
I'm unsure about how early life first reached the point of being reproduced through sexual couplings that required more than a single partner. It would seem to me that asexual reproduction is more "efficient," and therefore "preferable" to the process of natural selection. Wouldn't evolution favor a system of reproduction that doesn't require the cooperation (or at least, the simple presence) of another organism?
Does scientific consensus support the hypothesis (see The Red Queen
, cited in this very close earlier question
) that it boils down to engineering immunity to disease and parasites? Logically that makes sense to me, but only as an explanation for why sexual reproduction endured
, not why it originated
Does that make sense? Obviously, I'm not a biologist. Feel free to explain this to me using small words.