The Purpose of Sex

For a first post on this form, I thought I would go with something of general interest more or less...

What is the purpose of sex? The answer you normally expect and which you would most often hear in a class room is "to produce children (so there will always be somebody around to put Ikea furniture together)", or something like that.

But there is another way in which the question could be asked and the answer to that other version of the question is somewhat different.

"What is the purpose of sex, as opposed to the sort of asexual cloning which you see amongst bacteria and other simple creatures?" (And why is that such a huge problem for Chuck Darwin??)

Here's the problem: Sex DOUBLES the cost of maintaining populations. In other words, amongst asexual creatures, each creatures needs to have one offspring to keep population size together; the cost is basically one. For creatures which use sexual reproduction, each creature needs to be involved in procreating TWO like creatures, i.e. the cost is DOUBLED!!

The mathematics behind the theory of evolution says that increasing this genetic cost just a few percentage points will doom a species. Walter ReMine notes:

"Sexual reproduction is analogous to a roulette game in which the player throws away half his chips at each spin. ...the existence of sexual reproduction really is a huge paradox."

The real question is, what benefit could there possibly be to sexual reproduction that it would ever have evolved (if you believe in evolution ) or, equivalently for the more enlightened, why would a creator have created such a thing? That is, what possible benefit could out-weigh the gigantic and obvious cost problem?

The basic answer is, that sex is a kind of an error correction System similar to TCP/IP in data communications. It is intended to prevent recessive genes and mutations from annihilating an animal species within a relatively small number of generations. That is, it is intended to prevent precisely the things which are supposed to drive the theory of evolution...