My competing article: Why We Worship Thee, O Great Sex! It doesn’t cover as much ground as this, but I’m trying a new technique I’m calling “humor”, let me know how it worked out. Unless I shouldn’t quit my day job, in which case keep quiet. I like quitting goddammit
So why pick sex instead of one of these low-cost mechanisms?
The answer is… I don’t know, nobody really does, that’s why evolution is complex.
One theory is that sex is a hidden trait preserving mechanism.
I think it’s super important to stress that (1) evolution doesn’t really have goals or “pick” things, and if you think of it as goal-directed or choice-making, you’re missing something important; and (2) an extensive and routine gene recombination method was developed only once in 4 billion years. This indicates it is something that is highly unlikely to develop (and a candidate “great filter”). However, once it does develop, it improves grandchildren and so there is an exponential compounding of the benefits from that over time.
To say “one theory is that sex is a hidden trait preserving mechanism” is to suggest that evolution wanted to preserve hidden traits and therefore built a mechanism to do it, which inappropriately reverses causation. Instead, the theory (hypothesis?) would be better described as “sex was first created by chance*, but once created, acted as a hidden trait preserving mechanism, which helped it sexual organisms survive, thrive and fill the globe in the eons afterward.” (* in phases, surely not all at once)
I imagine that for some species “the vast majority of resources over an organism’s lifespan are spent on finding mates”, but is that a normal case? (I’m married, so I spend ~0 on that.) In any case, when it comes to creatures with elaborate mating features, like peacocks, I suppose it’s because the environment has enough slack to allow it. That is, if there aren’t a lot of predators around, the evolutionary process won’t optimize for what we tend to think it should.
But I don’t really know. I bought a textbook on evolution and it’s gathering dust. Textbooks are boring, or at least that’s what I evolved to think.
My competing article: Why We Worship Thee, O Great Sex! It doesn’t cover as much ground as this, but I’m trying a new technique I’m calling “humor”, let me know how it worked out. Unless I shouldn’t quit my day job, in which case keep quiet. I like quitting goddammit
I think it’s super important to stress that (1) evolution doesn’t really have goals or “pick” things, and if you think of it as goal-directed or choice-making, you’re missing something important; and (2) an extensive and routine gene recombination method was developed only once in 4 billion years. This indicates it is something that is highly unlikely to develop (and a candidate “great filter”). However, once it does develop, it improves grandchildren and so there is an exponential compounding of the benefits from that over time.
To say “one theory is that sex is a hidden trait preserving mechanism” is to suggest that evolution wanted to preserve hidden traits and therefore built a mechanism to do it, which inappropriately reverses causation. Instead, the theory (hypothesis?) would be better described as “sex was first created by chance*, but once created, acted as a hidden trait preserving mechanism, which helped it sexual organisms survive, thrive and fill the globe in the eons afterward.” (* in phases, surely not all at once)
I imagine that for some species “the vast majority of resources over an organism’s lifespan are spent on finding mates”, but is that a normal case? (I’m married, so I spend ~0 on that.) In any case, when it comes to creatures with elaborate mating features, like peacocks, I suppose it’s because the environment has enough slack to allow it. That is, if there aren’t a lot of predators around, the evolutionary process won’t optimize for what we tend to think it should.
But I don’t really know. I bought a textbook on evolution and it’s gathering dust. Textbooks are boring, or at least that’s what I evolved to think.