June 15, 2009 | David F. Coppedge

Darwinizing Sex Causes Pain

Sex brings pleasure to many, but pain to Darwinists.  Why?  Because they can’t figure it out.  Nick Lane is a case in point.  In New Scientist, he wrote,

Sex is the ultimate absurdity.  Forget the hormonal rushes, the sweat and the contorted posturing.  Forget about the heartache, the flowers, the bad poems and the costly divorce, just think about the biology.  It’s nuts.  Cloning makes far more sense.

From there, he spent three pages giving various evolutionary views on the origin of sex.  In the 20th century, sex was the “queen of evolutionary problems.”  What’s it good for?  How did it originate?  None of the standard hypotheses (increasing genetic diversity, providing protection against parasites, it came from mitochondria, it helps spread beneficial mutations) have stood up to scrutiny.  Any benefits seem too costly.
    “Has the mystery of sex been explained at last?” his title teased.  The end of the article should have the answer.  Lane seemed to vote for the view of Otto and Barton.  Their hypothesis requires three parameters: variability in the population, high mutation rates, and strong selection pressures.  How confident is this solution?  It’s hard to see which claims have been verified by empirical evidence:

“Sex improves the efficiency of selection, allowing good genes to recombine away from the junk residing in their genetic backgrounds,” says Otto.  “As the good genes spread, they then carry along the sex genes, beating out the genes for cloning, and often overcoming the costs of sex.”
    Exactly how often these circumstances apply is uncertain.  “It’s still not clear that selective interference gives a strong enough individual advantage to maintain high rates of sex and recombination,” says Barton.  “There needs to be a lot of selection, which is plausible but not definitely established as yet.

Lane took their ball and ran with it.  He thinks the combination of variability, high mutation rates and strong selection is “killer for clones” who are more susceptible to mutations.  “Heavy selection puts a premium on the genes that work, and means beneficial mutations are more likely to be selected at the expense of diversity,” he said.  “And diverse populations have the most to lose whenever there’s a selective sweep for a particular gene in this way.”  Lane did not appeal to any empirical evidence for this, nor did he explain why asexual microbes seem to have been doing pretty well diversity-wise and survival-wise for the history of the planet.
    Somehow, according to Lane, the first eukaryotes went through a period when “As a result of the early gene bombardment from mitochondria, the mutation rate surely shot through the roof” and parasitic introns were invading the genome, leading to high variability.  These statements, though, rely on other evolutionary hypotheses about the origins of mitochondria and introns.  And again, they fail to explain why prokaryotes never faced the triple whammy that he claims caused the eukaryotes to invent sex.  No matter; he moved on to the next queen of evolutionary problems.  For this, he earns Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week (as if the opening quote was not enough).  “Sex was the only answer.  Total sex.  Recombination of genes across all chromosomes.  The big question now is not so much why sex evolved – but how.”
    In a Texas A&M University press release echoed on PhysOrg, Adam Jones gave a confident statement that Darwin explained mate choice via sexual selection.  He said, “we know sexual selection occurs and is very important but there are still many unanswered questions about precisely why and how it works, especially in humans.”  One of those questions may be why homely and fat people continue to get married.  Another may be why some bird species like peacocks show extreme sexual dimorphism, but in others, the males and females look alike.  And can any theory be said to be correct if the questions of how and why remain unanswered?

How many times have we seen Darwinists do this?  Necessity is the mother of invention, so even though they are clueless about how, and have no evidence, they make up a story to have the solution arise miraculously.  They have unfeigned faith that Evolution (capitalized, because She is a Good Fairy in their theology) finds a way to cobble together an invention to meet the necessity.  Be a good coach.  Call foul when you see Illegal Procedure.

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