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Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations

#71

Post by tuan »

>> It increases genetic diversity in the pool of offspring. That diversity could then raise the fitness of future generations by making them stronger, faster, more resistant to parasites or otherwise more adaptable

Probably off topic, but I didn't know this was not a commonly accepted explanation. When I went to school (maybe middle school) in Vietnam in the early 90s, I was taught this. My biology teacher said this explains why marriage between closed relatives is not recommended because it leads to less diversity, and a bad gene would have chance to manifest.

Re: Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations

#72

Post by jshevek »

known wrote: post #34

Sex is good for your heart A hug keeps tension away Sex can be a stress buster Weekly sex might help fend off illness People who have sex feel healthier Loving support reduces risk of angina and ulcer https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/sexual-health/benefits-of-love-...

That quoting style is for code. It is difficult to read on mobile.

Re: Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations

#73

Post by smilekzs »

Koshkin wrote: post #54
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viruses

Sexual reproduction is not about injecting a DNA (or RNA) into a host cell for one's own sake.

> Last question, is meiosis and mitosis the only two way to reproduce?

GP answer is a valid example?

Re: Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations

#74

Post by the_af »

sdegutis wrote: post #64
throwaway6575 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is notoriously bad at anything related to biology, evolution, and genetics. It's a combination of this ( https://xkcd.com/1831/ ) and this ( https://xkcd.com/793/ ) comic. People there are also fond of finding a bunch of psychology papers that confirms existing biases. There's also a misleading phenomenon where many of the fields whose "experts" chime in on these questions are called evolutionary psychology or beh…

> HN is notoriously bad at anything related to biology, evolution, and genetics. It's a combination of this ( https://xkcd.com/1831/ ) and this ( https://xkcd.com/793/ ) comic. People there are also fond of finding a bunch of psychology papers that confirms existing biases. Also https://xkcd.com/55/ and https://xkcd.com/128/ This is the inevitable confusion of a society that insists that nothing exists outside what w…

Good call on those two XKCDs, but I think it's not society that believes that nothing exists outside what we can scientifically observe. Poets, writers and artists don't believe that. Hollywood makes a living out of not believing in that. Most people I meet don't believe that -- sometimes believing in all kinds of nonsense to an extreme I find irritating, but that's my problem :P

In any case, what's specifically irritating is the entrepreneur / startuper / tech bro belief that "we can make an app to solve this", which sometimes also occurs here on HN. No, not every problem can be solved with tech or an app. Even when it can, you Random Startuper are the sidekick of the story, not the main hero who's calling the shots.

Re: Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations

#75

Post by koeng »

reubenswartz wrote: post #65

I'm not a biologist, but my understanding is that bacteria are much more likely to undergo horizontal gene transfer when undress stress. (Particularly troubling these days for antibiotic resistance.) Seems like it would be a natural next step for single cell eukaryotes to have a similar mechanism to fix bad DNA, especially given the much longer genomes of eukaryotes, which the article discusses without mentioning bac…

Eukaryotes don’t really evolve very much on the protein level - their complexity allows them to mostly evolve on the regulatory level (while bacteria often still are on the protein level).

Practically, this means that getting proteins from elsewhere isn’t that selected for, while better regulation is. It’s a complicated subject, but that’s partially why there is so much “junk” dna in multicellular eukaryotes (single cellular like yeast are still pretty efficient)

Re: Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations

#76

Post by koeng »

vikramkr wrote: post #48
throwaway6575 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there are a few bioinformaticians around - but they're few and far between and are often graduate students or candidates. Contrast with the diversity of tech profiles you find on here, from 60 year old COBOL veterans to ex-Googlers or the creators of frameworks, and all the founders. I think there's a difficulty in that you can't just do biology from your garage, even bioinformatics. The standards have shifted,…

Well, the biohacker movement begs to differ on the garage part, but academic biologists would beg to differ with the biohackers there. I agree that there arent the diversity of opinion that you get in programming here (I'm certainly not amy sort of expert myself, new grad here), but that might come with time. Just having the experience of having studied biology, worked in a lab, written proposals and papers, all go a…

> Imagine we had a biology forum that was a bunch of biologists that barely knew what a computer was discussing the latest media hype around AI. Would be pretty bad.

Yea I’m around biotech forums quite a bit and it is just as bad from a technical side. However, people on HN and tech tend to be better at identifying how technology enables things to happens, which is interesting to me.

Re: Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations

#77

Post by koeng »

C. elegans is a good example of this. They have males and hermaphordites, but interestingly enough, the ratios of those two from lab and wild strains differed by quite a bit.

Turns out, in a stable lab environment, hermaphrodites were more efficient. However, once you started changing the environment populations with males could always adapt faster.

Re: Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations

#78

Post by Marsymars »

tuan wrote: post #71

>> It increases genetic diversity in the pool of offspring. That diversity could then raise the fitness of future generations by making them stronger, faster, more resistant to parasites or otherwise more adaptable Probably off topic, but I didn't know this was not a commonly accepted explanation. When I went to school (maybe middle school) in Vietnam in the early 90s, I was taught this. My biology teacher said this…

Reproduction between close relatives isn't recommended because of the chance of offspring getting multiple recessive genes. That's orthogonal to the genetic diversity benefits from sexual reproduction. (In asexual reproduction, you don't have to worry about offspring inheriting multiple recessive genes.)

Re: Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations

#79

Post by luckylion »

throwaway6575 wrote: post #59
globular-toast wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I've actually worked in bioinformatics and with biologists who have studied sexual species their entire life and my top-level comment was one of the ones that got buried. The main thing to learn from this is you can't really talk about this stuff because people don't want certain things to be true. Biologists tended to talk about this stuff openly with me after a few drinks. They dare not speak about it most…

Lol I've heard so many times about the conspiracy of biologists who are afraid to "tell the truth" about sex differences. Everyone is like Damore, cowing in front of the SJW crowd and afraid to be fired4truth. The reality is much more tame. The crux of the matter (and potential controversy) is not about sex differences in plants or C. elegans. Most biologists I've met who study algae or polar bears usually limit thei…

> "most of what works in other species doesn't work in humans" (see: 99% of drug trials)

Isn't the point of doing animal trials that they are "close enough" for most things to deliver good results? I.e. "if you can't do it in mice, dogs and pigs with your proposed medication, you probably won't be able to do it in humans". They're close enough that xenotransplantation is actively considered. "Humans are so special, everything we learn about anything that isn't human does most likely not apply to humans, so don't you dare even suggest that" just sounds strange to me.

Re: Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations

#80

Post by Supermancho »

Suncho wrote: post #45
itchyjunk wrote: post #20

I like how the article starts but I think it got lost a bit in hypothetical and anecdotes towards the end. Not holding it against the article though. As the article rightly points out, anything involving sex drags in biases as well. I wonder how convergent evolution [0] fits into this? Maybe one form of reproduction leaves a large niche open for another type of reproduction to fill in. Could it be that there was sexu…

> Could it be that there was sexual reproduction first and asexual reproduction came later? Unlikely. You can't mate with copies of yourself unless there are already multiple copies of yourself floating around. I like the story they present in the article. For simple organisms, it's fairly inexpensive to let defective individuals die off. As organisms get more complex, it starts to become more costly to allow defects…

> Unlikely. You can't mate with copies of yourself unless there are already multiple copies of yourself floating around.

Asexual reproduction doesn't require copies of "yourself". Plants can self fertilize and they are some of the most complex organisms to do it and you probably know this.

Can you rephrase that statement?

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