The Origin of Sex
I came across this entry about the origin of sexual reproduction:
The Origin of Sex: Cosmic Solution to Ancient Mystery
By Robert Roy Britt, Senior Science Writer, posted: 10 July 2001
"Now a new study out of Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has used digital organisms to simulate life before sex and yielded a possible mechanism for instigating Earth's first courtship.
Comet or asteroid impacts could have stressed asexual organisms enough to send them down the path of sexual reproduction after forcing a flurry of genetic mutations, the study shows. Heavy doses of radiation might also have done the trick."
At present, there is no satisfactory naturalistic (that is to say, evolutionary) theory to explain how sexual reproduction came about. Sexual reproduction gives rise to variation in offspring, but at such a tremendous cost to the species that in evolutionary terms it makes no sense.
The Bible states that Eve was a product of Adam's body, and if all sexually reproducing animals were created in the same way, with the female being created from the original created creature, this would explain how God created sex and why such creatures only reproduce after their own "kind."
This notion is more fully explored in my book, Overcoming Prejudice in the Evolution/Creation Debate: Developing an integrative approach to Science and Christianity.
posted by Gary @ 7:33 PM
1 Comments:
Just because the naturalistic explanation of how sexual reproduction came about is complex doesn't make it unsatisfactory.
Part of the counter-argument to your position is at www.talkorigins.org where they say:
1. The variety of life cycles is very great. It is not simply a matter of being sexual or asexual. There are many intermediate stages. A gradual origin, with each step favored by natural selection, is possible (Kondrashov 1997). The earliest steps involve single-celled organisms exchanging genetic information; they need not be distinct sexes. Males and females most emphatically would not evolve independently. Sex, by definition, depends on both male and female acting together. As sex evolved, there would have been some incompatibilities causing sterility (just as there are today), but these would affect individuals, not whole populations, and the genes that cause such incompatibility would rapidly be selected against.
2. Many hypotheses have been proposed for the evolutionary advantage of sex (Barton and Charlesworth 1998). There is good experimental support for some of these, including resistance to deleterious mutation load (Davies et al. 1999) and more rapid adaptation in a rapidly changing environment, especially to acquire resistance to parasites (Sá Martins 2000).
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