I've been wondering if John Logsdon was still alive. There have been very few postings on his blog Sex, Genes, & Evoluton. Now we know why. He has been organizing a meeting about Sex in Iowa. (Is that an oxymoron?)This looks like a very interesting meeting. Most of the key players are going to be there. Looking over the list of speakers makes you realize that the problem of sex is still very complicated. We don't have a consensus on the evolutionary advantages of sex (if any). This is an important point since many on the evolutionist side think otherwise. They believe that the evolutionary advantages of sex have been proven and it's no longer an open question.
I hope we'll hear a summary of the talks once the meeting is over.
4 comments :
I'll be there. Maybe I'll try to live-blog it (never done that)
Maybe those evolutionary biologists who think sex is an open-and-shut case could take a look at fungal pathogens like Candida albicans, which appears to have disposed of sex or Cryptococcus neoformans which appears to be well on the way to getting rid of it.
The Lorax, in turn, can tell us why species that go parthenogenic don't tend to hang around very long. Not the paper I wanted, but it has some good citations, and I should be productive.
Anyhow, I tend to think people who believe it's open and shut have a hobby horse they favour over the others. The folks that aren't wed to a given idea tend to (I hope/think) recognize it for the mess that it is.
Were it an open and shut case, I'd be out of a Ph.D.!
The thing I've found strange about the discussions involving mechanisms explaining the maintenance of sex is that they tend to focus on the exclusivity of a single mechanism (e.g., Kondrashov's Mutational Deterministic model) rather than the possibility of synergy between multiple mechanisms. I'm no mathemagician, but I suppose such things are easier to model. There are a lot of theoretical mechanisms that apply in different cases, and may work together to explain the evolution and maintenance (something that's often forgotten in such discussions) of sex.
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