Intelligent Sex: A Cognitivist View of Genetic Exchange Processes

Abstract

If the wonder of language cannot be a real wonder, perhaps sexual reproduction, as Trivers points out so poignantly for a scientist, is such a great puzzle of nature that it could be an adequate substitute for the loss of the cultural wonder of language. Trivers is correct insofar as the mechanisms and the associated functions of sexual reproduction are concerned since, until recently, they were considered to be unproblematic and requiring no special explanation. For a long time, it was thought that sex simply increases the average rate of evolution for a species and for this reason alone, asexually reproducing species must automatically be supplanted by sexually reproducing ones in the long run. In the meantime the situation has changed somewhat and for about twenty years there has been an animated debate, which is still in full flow over the real adaptive function of sexual reproduction. If we are thirsting after a real wonder of nature then we would have found, at least with the ifs and buts of sex, a surely attractive and simultaneously, as I will attempt to demonstrate, a highly qualified candidate.

Perhaps the deepest mystery in all of biology concerns the meaning of sexual reproduction.

Robert Trivers

The likely explanation is that sex generates a greater number of different genotypes, adapted to a wider range of ecological conditions.

John Maynard Smith