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Murray Gell-MannThe Quark and the Jaguar255 |
Advantages of sexual reproduction
In any case, the advantages of sexual reproduction must be considerable to outweigh the obvious disadvantage of breaking up the successful genotypes of parents and grandparents that survived long enough to reproduce. These advantages accrue to the population as a whole, however, while many evolutionary biologists insist that selection pressures are exerted only on individuals. Perhaps that need not be a rigid rule.
At a recent Santa Fe Institute meeting, John Maynard Smith, who teaches at the University of Sussex, was commenting on this issue, when Brian Arthur, chairing the session, recalled the occasion when they first met. Both men have a background in engineering. Maynard Smith became an aircraft designer and then took up evolutionary biology, to which he has made some remarkable contributions. Brian, who grew up in Belfast, went into operations research and then economics, becoming a professor at Stanford and the founding director of the economics program at the Santa Fe Institute. The first encountered each other at a scienfice meeting in Sweden, where Maynard Smith remarked in the course of a lecture that while sex had obvious advantages for a polulation, it was not clear what it did for the individual. Brian called out from the audience, “What a very English view of sex!” Maynard Smithm without missin a beat, replied, “I gather from your accent that you’re Irish. Well, in England at least we have sex.”