Re: Evolution of sex revisited
- From: William Morse <wdNOSPAmorse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:50:24 -0400 (EDT)
Tim Tyler wrote:
Evolution of sex revisited:
"Has the mystery of sex been explained at last?"
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227121.600-has-the-mystery-of-sex-been-explained-at-last.html
Pretty severe Red Queen criticisms!
I accessed Sally Otto's referenced paper - to see if it was correct.
It's a computer-model paper, and doesn't describe its algorithm or
provide source code :-(
The paper doesn't say its model is spatialised. Failure to use
a spatialised model is a key mistake in Red Queen models. It is
important for pathogens to be able to track their hosts down the
generations. Spatialisation is one simple way of doing that.
The paper concludes:
``These results show that, when a species must constantly evolve
to stay abreast of surrounding species, the Red Queen does not
maintain high amounts of sex and recombination unless species
interactions induce strong selection per locus.''
ISTM that the whole point of parasites in the model is that they
provide gigantic selection pressures - enough to counter-balance
the cost of sex.
This all seems rather weak to me. Is there any better evidence
against Hamilton's model that I am missing?
There was a brief review in the 5 June Science (p. 1254) of this
question. That article indicated that the explanation for sex includes
the Red Queen but also includes a number of other factors, such as the
improved fitness from recombination and a model that shows that "genes
for sex spread thanks to their own selfish drive to generate ever more
copies of themselves".
Yours,
Bill Morse
.
- References:
- Evolution of sex revisited
- From: Tim Tyler
- Evolution of sex revisited
- Prev by Date: Re: Attention all arrogant "junk"-DNA ignorers!
- Next by Date: Re: Symbiosis
- Previous by thread: Evolution of sex revisited
- Next by thread: Re: Evolution of sex revisited
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
