The purpose of sex...

The purpose of sex (as opposed to the kind of asexual cloning you see in bacteria) and why that is such a giant problem for Chuck Darwin

http://www.trueorigin.org/sex01.asp

http://kgov.com/The-Origin-of-Sexual-Reproduction

Quote:
ReMine Quotes Dawkins: "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."

What is the purpose of sex? The answer you normally expect and which you would hear in a class room is "to produce children, so there will always be somebody 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?

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 evolutionism says that increasing this genetic cost just a few percentage points will doom a species.....

The 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 problem?

Most of the material I see claims that there is no clear answer to this one. I claim that there is and that it should be fairly obvious. You can do your own Google search on inbreeding and read horror stories to your hearts content. But, as bad as inbreeding may be, imagine how bad it would be if the absolute same genetic profile simply kept on reproducing ITSELF??? That would basically be a turbocharged version of inbreeding.

As I see it, the purpose of sex is to prevent recessive genes and mutations from driving complex species to extinction within a few generations.

But, WAIT!! Aren't mutations supposed to be the driving mechanism of evolution itself?? That's right, sex is intended to prevent precisely the things which are supposed to drive evolution. Sex is basically an error correction scheme analogous to something like TCP/IP in data communications.