This year's Valentine's card of choice
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY! As a perpetually single girl this is my favorite holiday of the year. The first and second half of those statements may appear conflicted. However, every year on Valentine’s Day, I send out glorious amounts of Valentine’s to all my single friends (See below for this years!), eat chocolate and drink red wine while ordering myself sexy lingerie on the internet. Yeah, it’s a pretty awesome holiday. This year, one of my favorite evolutionary biologists has upped the excitement by publishing a paper on what conditions favor sex! Perfect for Valentine’s Day!
Why organisms reproduce sexually is one of the great mysteries in evolutionary biology (I’d like to note that here I’m talking about sex in terms of reproduction. It isn’t a mystery to me why organisms copulate, the differences being if that sex comes with offspring while copulation is just good old fashioned fun). There are a number of theoretical reasons that they shouldn’t! One of the strongest arguments was first laid out by John Maynard Smith (1978) who noted that an asexual female can produce twice as many offspring per individual than a sexual female, who wastes half of her effort producing males. This almost immediately results in sexuals being driven to extinction and is termed “the two-fold cost of males.”
