coerced group collaborative evolution as an explanation for sexual reproduction’s prevalence强迫群协同进化解释有性生殖的患病率.pdfVIP

Vol.2, No.11, 1253-1263 (2010) Natural Science /10.4236/ns.2010.211152 Coerced group collaborative evolution as an explanation for sexual reproduction’s prevalence 1 2* Robert J. Lin , Feng Lin 1School of Medicine, Wayne State University, Detroit, USA 2College of Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, USA; *Corresponding author: flin@ Received 10 July 2010; revised 15 August 2010; accepted 18 August 2010. ABSTRACT not only to biologists, but also to the general public as a The prevalence of sexual reproduction has long whole [1-4]. The prevalence of sexual reproduction sug- been an outstanding problem of evolutionary gests that there are major benefits provided by this mode biology. Different explanations have been of- of reproduction. The benefits, however, are not obvious. fered to explain the prevalence of sexual re- In many ways, asexual reproduction seems to be a better production. These explanations mainly focus on evolutionary strategy: only one parent is required, and the benefits of sexual reproduction’s ability to all of the parents genes are passed on to its progeny shuffle and recombine genes. In this paper, we [5-12]. In a sexual population, the males are unable to propose an alternative and comprehensive produce offspring of their own and females only transfer point of view to this important problem. We first half their genes to offspring, hence the theoretical prob- hypothesize that sexual reproduction leads to lem of the ‘two-fold cost of males.’ Sexual repr