Sex promotes gamete selection: A quantitative comparative study of features favoring the evolution of sex

: Explaining the maintenance of sexual reproduction remains one of the greatest challenges in biology. The theoretical oddity of sex is based on at least three advantages that asexual organisms have over sexual ones: 1- Asexuals, by not producing males, have a two fold advantage over sexuals, regarding the number of reproductive individuals; 2- Sexuals have an evolutionary disadvantage over asexuals, in that a rare alleles that increases fitness of one parent, for example, is not necessarily transmitted to the offspring, due to segregation. 3- Asexuals do not have to find a mate in order to reproduce. Here I present the results of evolutionary tournaments performed using the agent based computer simulation Biodynamica. The tournaments explored the relative merits of various features that have been proposed to affect the putative advantages of sexual reproduction, including ploidy, mate selection, large reproductive variance of males, low mutation rates, gamete selection, reduced cost f...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2004
• Where: COMPLEXITY
• Authors: Klaus Jaffe
• Keywords: Asexual, COMPLEXITY 2004, Gamete Selection, Sexual Reproduction