In article <5ikrmc$mhp at nntp3.u.washington.edu>,
Joe Felsenstein <joe at evolution.genetics.washington.edu> wrote:
>In article <E8FtMJ.9Ln at gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>,
>L.A. Moran <lamoran at gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> wrote:
>[in response to postings about how easy it was to explain "sex"]
[quotations from a Felsenstein paper pointing out that the simple
explanations of the evolution of sex are inadequate and that sex is
a difficult problem for evolutionists]
>Whoa. Cited that way, it sounds like my paper of 1988 concludes that
>there is no decent explanation for "sex" (actually the argument is about
>outcrossing-plus-recombination but it is conventional to call it "sex" so
>as to attract more excitement). A more careful reading will disclose
>that my position is that we have a whole bunch of explanations of "sex"
>and that the problem for evolutionary biology is not to come up with an
>explanation of "sex", but to distinguish between different possible ones.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you (and others) don't have educated
guesses concerning the orign of sex. (Perhaps hypotheses would be a better
term?) The problem is to determine which, if any, of these hypotheses is
correct. However, the main point that you make is that the question is far
from solved and you mentioned that the simple textbook explanations are
not likely to be correct. I wanted to post your comments because it
directly refuted the claim that the explanation of sex was easy and could
be found in any textbook.
I didn't think that you would respond to the original article. I was
trying to indicate that some very smart people have concluded that sex
is a problem. BTW, this compliment doesn't imply that I agree with all
of your hypotheses .... (-:
>The passages cited are building up to mentioning a bunch of different
>explanations people have advanced.
Yep, .... and some of them are interesting while others are very likely
to be wrong. Hence, we have a problem with sex.
Larry Moran
