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from the never-used-that-excuse-before dept.
Why does sex exist when organisms that clone themselves use less time and energy, and do not need a mate to produce offspring? Researchers at the University of Stirling aiming to answer this age-old question have discovered that sex can help the next generation resist infection.
Populations that clone themselves are entirely female and do not need sex to reproduce. As sex requires males, and males do not produce offspring themselves, an entirely clonal population should always reproduce faster than a sexual one.
Yet while some animal and plant species can reproduce without sex, such as komodo dragons, starfish and bananas, sex is still the dominant mode of reproduction in the natural world.
Scientists know that sex allows genes to mix, allowing populations to quickly evolve and adapt to changing environments, including rapidly evolving parasites.
However, for sex to beat cloning as a reproduction strategy, there must be large-scale benefits that make a difference to the next generation. The theory has been difficulty to test as most organisms are either wholly sexual or clonal so cannot be compared easily.
A team of experts from the University of Stirling have taken an innovative approach to test the costs and benefits of sex. Using an organism that can reproduce both ways, the waterflea, researchers found sexually produced offspring were more than twice as resistant to infectious disease as their clonal sisters.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @09:39PM
I've heard about this theory as the top explanation of sex for roughly 5 years. This seems to be confirmation of the top theory.
It's essentially security-through-obscurity: the offspring have semi-custom (re-combined) genes, making it harder for invaders to depend on an existing pattern of genes.
The script-kiddie viruses cannot as easily use pre-canned attack algorithms or techniques since each offspring is genetically unique.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @06:59PM
Yeah. Sex is one way for slower reproducing multicellular organisms to keep up with rapidly reproducing organisms.
If there's not enough diversity they can get wiped out: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-the-banana/ [damninteresting.com]
With sex a species can have thousands or even millions of different individuals with genes that "mostly" work in practice, and hopefully enough of them mate with the fitter individuals selecting for more genes that work better in the changing environment. It's like multiple subspecies swapping genes.
Without sex or other gene transfer the evolution can only be by mutations many of which aren't proven to work (not a problem if the species reproduces rapidly).