Philosophy Now Forum

The human capacity for reproduction lies nearly exclusively in the body of women, whose reproductive organs perform all the heavy lifting. The portion of reproduction needing a male's input is disproportionately tiny. If males play such a minor role, could they be eliminated entirely? And why do males even exist in the first place?

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Sexes do not exist due to a division of labor in the world and behavior.

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Dual sexes are not the result of "functional specialization".

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The existence of males does not correspond to an imperative in nature towards territorial aggression.

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The sexes, or genders, do not exist due to some mystical cosmic principle of yin yang.

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Simple organisms reproduce sexually. Plants and even fungus reproduce sexually. Yes, fungus has two sexes and they have to meet to reproduce offspring. Consider the life of a fungus. There is no division of labor and certainly no functional specialization in the life cycle. Yet they have two sexes. Why?

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Males exist in the world because males are the way nature has imposed sexual reproduction. By cutting off half the population into "males" who cannot reproduce on their own, but must mate with a female to copy their genetic material. Certainly nature does not "impose" things -- like some sort of teleological deus ex machina. The question then reduces to why the earth favored populations who divide the sexes. In other words, what advantage do sexual populations have over those populations who reproduce by making clones?

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Sexual reproduction allows for recombination of the genotype. It is now an established mathematical theorem that populations which engage in genetic recombination adapt faster than those which do not (asexual cloners). But what is it about recombination that allows for this faster adaptivity?

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We can imagine a cartoon scenario between a mother and a father who have a child. The father is a native of South America, and the mother is from a native population of Finland. The father's skin, sweat glands and vascular system is adapted to hot tropical climate, while the mother has adaptions to dark, cold, dry climate. Their child inherits their traits in such a way that some of them are from the father, and some from the mother. In other words, the genotype of the child is a re-combination of the chromosomes of the parents. There is no guarantee that the child will inherit the "best of both worlds" and be a super-human with dual climactic adaptations. However, there is a slight statistical probability that this will happen. We can weigh this probability against the probability of an asexually reproducing clone population producing (by natural selection) the same result. In effect, we are pitting sexually-reproducing population against asexual cloning to see which one could produce a doubly-adapted child containing the best of both climate traits. The time it would take an asexual cloning population to produce such a child would be ridiculously long in geological time. Entire epochs of time would pass without this ever happening, and it would happen only by sheer accident -- if at all. On the other hand, the sexually-reproducing population could produce a child like this far faster. Although there is no guarantee that genetic recombination always adds together the best of both parents, there is a slight possibility this will happen. Over geological epochs, the statistical math plays out. The possibility of best traits in one child will overcome the probability of the cloners' adaptations.

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Nature has banked on this slight possibility. It is stochastic and it is statistical in nature, but the math works out in the end. Populations who recombine their genotypes can adapt faster to swift changes in their environment, such as ice ages and protracted droughts. Those populations who did not adapt went extinct, leaving only the quick adapters around to inherit the future. I declare here, that it is this slight possibility alone that accounts for the existence of sex -- and hence the existence of males on this planet. Nature already "figured this out" when life on earth was very simple. Far before the first land animal evolved, nature had already pitted the two types of reproduction against each other, and the fast adapting form prevailed. Land-based organisms (such as primates) emerged much later in the earth's history. They inherited, in full, a dual sexual system produced by much earlier evolution.


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We can draw the correct concluding statement now. Males exist because of a statistical law in the genotypes of organisms who inherit traits through DNA strands. Men do not exist due to functional specialization, nor do they exist due to a yin yang principle, nor do they exist due to territorial aggression in land animals. Men exist because of a statistical law in the mathematics of DNA strands encoding traits. Men exist because of math.

Kuznetzova wrote:The human capacity for reproduction lies nearly exclusively in the body of women, whose reproductive organs perform all the heavy lifting. The portion of reproduction needing a male's input is disproportionately tiny. If males play such a minor role, could they be eliminated entirely? And why do males even exist in the first place?

Whatever the foregoing you make yourself look silly asking this question.
Natural History tells us how the male and female evolved; in the first place


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Sexes do not exist due to a division of labor in the world and behaviour.

Sexes perform a division of labour in reproduction whether you like it or not. In a social context males and females can be demonstrated dividing labour in terms of roles.
You've only to look at our nearest relations in evolution.

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Dual sexes are not the result of "functional specialization".

Functional specialisation in the consequence of sexual differentiation.

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The sexes, or genders, do not exist due to some mystical cosmic principle of yin yang.

So what does?


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Simple organisms reproduce sexually. Plants and even fungus reproduce sexually. Yes, fungus has two sexes and they have to meet to reproduce offspring. Consider the life of a fungus. There is no division of labor and certainly no functional specialization in the life cycle. Yet they have two sexes. Why?

Why not. Why because it works.

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Males exist in the world because males are the way nature has imposed sexual reproduction.
circular argument.
By cutting off half the population into "males" who cannot reproduce on their own, but must mate with a female to copy their genetic material. Certainly nature does not "impose" things -- like some sort of teleological deus ex machina. The question then reduces to why the earth favored populations who divide the sexes. In other words, what advantage do sexual populations have over those populations who reproduce by making clones?

Evolution carries with it a range of traits that are incidental to survival. Traits and behaviours are not in themselves selected, Only successful individuals are selected, and these carry traits and behaviours that have no special significance to survival. The only line that must be crossed is that a surviving species continues to produce viable progeny.
As sexual reproduction with or without sexual individualisation and differentiation is a successful strategy, it persists.
Clone making species do not have Variation. Variation is one strategy that ensures survival in changing environments.
Pretty obviously.

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Sexual reproduction allows for recombination of the genotype. It is now an established mathematical theorem that populations which engage in genetic recombination adapt faster than those which do not (asexual cloners). But what is it about recombination that allows for this faster adaptivity?

If you know the answer - why are you asking it?

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We can imagine a cartoon scenario between a mother and a father who have a child. The father is a native of South America, and the mother is from a native population of Finland. The father's skin, sweat glands and vascular system is adapted to hot tropical climate, while the mother has adaptions to dark, cold, dry climate. Their child inherits their traits in such a way that some of them are from the father, and some from the mother. In other words, the genotype of the child is a re-combination of the chromosomes of the parents. There is no guarantee that the child will inherit the "best of both worlds" and be a super-human with dual climactic adaptations. However, there is a slight statistical probability that this will happen. We can weigh this probability against the probability of an asexually reproducing clone population producing (by natural selection) the same result. In effect, we are pitting sexually-reproducing population against asexual cloning to see which one could produce a doubly-adapted child containing the best of both climate traits. The time it would take an asexual cloning population to produce such a child would be ridiculously long in geological time. Entire epochs of time would pass without this ever happening, and it would happen only by sheer accident -- if at all. On the other hand, the sexually-reproducing population could produce a child like this far faster. Although there is no guarantee that genetic recombination always adds together the best of both parents, there is a slight possibility this will happen. Over geological epochs, the statistical math plays out. The possibility of best traits in one child will overcome the probability of the cloners' adaptations.

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Nature has banked on this slight possibility. It is stochastic and it is statistical in nature, but the math works out in the end. Populations who recombine their genotypes can adapt faster to swift changes in their environment, such as ice ages and protracted droughts. Those populations who did not adapt went extinct, leaving only the quick adapters around to inherit the future. I declare here, that it is this slight possibility alone that accounts for the existence of sex -- and hence the existence of males on this planet. Nature already "figured this out" when life on earth was very simple. Far before the first land animal evolved, nature had already pitted the two types of reproduction against each other, and the fast adapting form prevailed. Land-based organisms (such as primates) emerged much later in the earth's history. They inherited, in full, a dual sexual system produced by much earlier evolution.


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We can draw the correct concluding statement now. Males exist because of a statistical law in the genotypes of organisms who inherit traits through DNA strands.



Men do not exist due to functional specialization,

This is a circular argument.
nor do they exist due to territorial aggression in land animals.

Though having individuals with fighting capability has ensured the survival of species, so that is another reason males have been successful. So no, you are wrong.


Men exist because of a statistical law in the mathematics of DNA strands encoding traits. Men exist because of math.

Women exist because of a statistical law in the mathematics of DNA strands encoding traits. Men exist because of math.

I think you need to get laid.

chaz wyman wrote:Clone making species do not have Variation. Variation is one strategy that ensures survival in changing environments.
Pretty obviously.

Your understanding of this is completely wrong. Cloning populations can sustain large amounts of variation. It is not variation that endows the advantage to sexually-reproducing populations -- it is the RECOMBINATION that endows the advantage. We have a very good reason to believe this true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland%27s_schema_theorem

chaz wyman wrote: Natural History tells us how the male and female evolved; in the first place

We are not pressed with the question as to why females exist. All organisms were "female" until evolution produced males that could not reproduce themselves alone. I actually specified this in my original post. Maybe you missed it.

chaz wyman wrote: Sexes perform a division of labour in reproduction whether you like it or not.

Only some do. There is no division of labour in the life cycle of fungus. Many plants are hermaphrodites. Some land-dwelling worms are hermaphrodites. The point is that division-of-labor was not a FORCE WHICH PRODUCED sexual reproduction prior to it existing.

chaz wyman wrote: Functional specialisation in the consequence of sexual differentiation.

Right. That's precisely what I said. If Functional specialization is a consequence then it was not the cause of sex.

chaz wyman wrote: Why not. Why because it works.

You have asked "Why not"? Why not? Because going through a lengthy , energy-consuming, time-consuming mating process is less efficient than simply cloning a copy by splitting in two, as bacteria do. The onus of explanation then falls on the biologist to explain what greater advantage is reaped by a population that cannot reproduce copies unless they engage in a lengthy, dangerous, inefficient process of mating.

chaz wyman wrote: circular argument.

That statement is not circular at all. If nature endowed a population with the choice to go through a lengthy, complex, dangerous, energy-consuming, inefficient mating process, -or- to simply bud off a copy of itself, all organisms with that choice would choose to bud off a copy. In the short spans of time (in the short term) that would be wildly advantageous. Your budding copies would quickly dominate the landscape and overtake all the other organisms who wasted their time in mating rituals. That's demonstrably obvious. But in the long term, that tactic is doomed to extinction. In long ago geological periods nature already "worked this all out". It had billions of years to test whether the hare-velocity of cloning copies could outperform the lengthy, complex, dangerous process of mating done by the tortoise. Nature pitted the "tortoise" against the "hare" (so to speak) in an ancient epoch, and the tortoise won the earth and inherited it.

Therefore nature cannot simply allow them to make that choice, it must impose it directly into their bodies. That argument is not circular in any way.

This is the reason sex exists. It is the reason males exist. Only much much later did functional specialization and sexual dimorphism emerge among land animals. But those land animals were not making clone copies. They were, de novo, engaging in sexual processes that had been established long before they came to exist.

chaz wyman wrote: Evolution carries with it a range of traits that are incidental to survival. Traits and behaviours are not in themselves selected, Only successful individuals are selected, and these carry traits and behaviours that have no special significance to survival. The only line that must be crossed is that a surviving species continues to produce viable progeny.

"Only successful individuals are selected." This used to be believed by academic biology some 90 or more years ago. That's fine, but today we know of many species which engage in horizontal gene transfer. Integrating those lifeforms into biology required a massive overhaul of the foundations of evolutionary theory. My proposal for the existence of males is taken from the perspective of evolutionary genetics. And also, I think I made that very explicit in the original post. I said these laws of statistics are due to encoding traits in a DNA strand. I think I said that at least three times in my original post.

Before you even think about replying to this, please take a rest, drink some water and come back and read this very slowly when you are refreshed and awake. Organisms are not amorphous buckets that carry around traits in a rucksack on their backs. Organisms on this planet encode their traits in a genotype that is stored as a string of amino acids. If organisms store and transmit their traits as an encoded string, then that process will be subject to all the laws of statistics and mathematics of information-encoding strings. Denying that would be like denying that 2 + 2 equals 4. You can try to deny the truth of statistics, but you are going to have to really present some very elaborate independent research to do that.

If you are going to tear my posts apart like some gradeschool teacher correcting spelling and grammar, you will need to be awake enough to read and understand what I actually wrote. Given the short length of your replies, and their speed of turn around, I am going to assume you are either drunk on beer, high on something, or you are not getting enough sleep. Your replies are devolving into short "nuh-uh!" quips. Your posts do not contain reasoned arguments nor references to modern literature in evolutionary biology.

Kuznetzova wrote:

chaz wyman wrote: Natural History tells us how the male and female evolved; in the first place

We are not pressed with the question as to why females exist. All organisms were "female" until evolution produced males that could not reproduce themselves alone. I actually specified this in my original post. Maybe you missed it.

chaz wyman wrote: Sexes perform a division of labour in reproduction whether you like it or not.

Only some do. There is no division of labour in the life cycle of fungus. Many plants are hermaphrodites. Some land-dwelling worms are hermaphrodites. The point is that division-of-labor was not a FORCE WHICH PRODUCED sexual reproduction prior to it existing.

chaz wyman wrote: Functional specialisation in the consequence of sexual differentiation.

Right. That's precisely what I said. If Functional specialization is a consequence then it was not the cause of sex.

No, you said that the causality was the other way round. You are locked in a series of circular arguments, where you fool yourself that describing a thing with different words offers an explanation.

chaz wyman wrote: Why not. Why because it works.

You have asked "Why not"? Why not? Because going through a lengthy , energy-consuming, time-consuming mating process is less efficient than simply cloning a copy by splitting in two, as bacteria do. The onus of explanation then falls on the biologist to explain what greater advantage is reaped by a population that cannot reproduce copies unless they engage in a lengthy, dangerous, inefficient process of mating.

Evolution does not give a rat's arse. Sexual reproduction works. Evolution's only rubric is viable progeny. Sexual reproduction produces viable progeny with a greater degree of genetic variation. This is a complete no-brainer.
From the start species have had 50% of their population able to act without the burden of pregnancy, egg laying or child rearing. Males often protect the nest, provide child rearing, and protection for the family.
I fail to see why you have a problem with this.

chaz wyman wrote: circular argument.

That statement is not circular at all.

You do it all the time. You seem to think that if you can use different words to describe the same thing you have somehow explained something. You are typical of science type thinkers, and confuse description with explanation.
I'll point it out to you next time you do it.

Therefore nature cannot simply allow them to make that choice, it must impose it directly into their bodies. That argument is not circular in any way.

Nature is not a thing that decides to allow or disallow. Until you can speak about nature as it is, nothing you say with make any sense. nature does not impose anything. You are using childish anthropomorphisation.

This is the reason sex exists.

THE reason? Causality is always multifaceted. ONE reason is never enough.

It is the reason males exist. Only much much later did functional specialization and sexual dimorphism emerge among land animals. But those land animals were not making clone copies. They were, de novo, engaging in sexual processes that had been established long before they came to exist.

DUH!!

chaz wyman wrote: Evolution carries with it a range of traits that are incidental to survival. Traits and behaviours are not in themselves selected, Only successful individuals are selected, and these carry traits and behaviours that have no special significance to survival. The only line that must be crossed is that a surviving species continues to produce viable progeny.

"Only successful individuals are selected."

This used to be believed by academic biology some 90 or more years ago. That's fine, but today we know of many species which engage in horizontal gene transfer.

NO organism that practices sexual reproduction practices any horizontal gene transfer. And as you are talking about SEX, horizontal gene transfer is not relevant.
(We've covered this ground before)
Not that this is a valid objection to what I said. Whether or not organisms are promiscuous with their genes does not stop the fact that; in higher animals "Only successful individuals are selected."; and that sharing genes still means that successful individuals are selected, be they with borrowed genes or not.


Integrating those lifeforms into biology required a massive overhaul of the foundations of evolutionary theory. My proposal for the existence of males is taken from the perspective of evolutionary genetics. And also, I think I made that very explicit in the original post. I said these laws of statistics are due to encoding traits in a DNA strand. I think I said that at least three times in my original post.

Evolution does not work on genes, traits or behaviour, but on whole organisms. Each surviving organism comes compete with a complex genome which includes traits that are positive, neutral and even negative. THe future might render such successful strategies negative, or even negative strategies may become positive - it all depends on a changing environment.
We cannot tell the moment that sexual differentiation occurred; and we cannot say that everything was female before this happened - that is ridiculous. But we can tell that by and large the strategy has proved successful, and is present in most animal macro-organisms. From that moment both males and females have been necessary.


Before you even think about replying to this, please take a rest, drink some water and come back and read this very slowly when you are refreshed and awake.

I'd like to make the same suggestion to you too.

Organisms are not amorphous buckets that carry around traits in a rucksack on their backs. Organisms on this planet encode their traits in a genotype that is stored as a string of amino acids. If organisms store and transmit their traits as an encoded string, then that process will be subject to all the laws of statistics and mathematics of information-encoding strings. Denying that would be like denying that 2 + 2 equals 4. You can try to deny the truth of statistics, but you are going to have to really present some very elaborate independent research to do that.

But evolution treats organisms like an amorphous bucket. IT SELECTS INDIVIDUALS. NOT genes, NOT traits, NOT specific behaviours.


If you are going to tear my posts apart like some gradeschool teacher correcting spelling and grammar, you will need to be awake enough to read and understand what I actually wrote. Given the short length of your replies, and their speed of turn around, I am going to assume you are either drunk on beer, high on something, or you are not getting enough sleep. Your replies are devolving into short "nuh-uh!" quips. Your posts do not contain reasoned arguments nor references to modern literature in evolutionary biology.

If you want to be taken seriously, then you need to be a little less patronising.

Pour a cup of tea and read this...

I'll leave you with one thought

There has been a long-standing, subtle confusion, elegantly expressed by Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini between;
"(1) The claim that evolution is a process in which creatures with adaptive traits are selected and
(2) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures are selected for their adaptive traits."
”[1] This subtle difference is at the heart of the diverse uses and abuses of Darwinism."

Point 1 is right, point 2 is wrong.
It's a confusion and misconception that you express in all your posts about evolution, you are a point 2er.

From the start species have had 50% of their population able to act without the burden of pregnancy, egg laying or child rearing. Males often protect the nest, provide child rearing, and protection for the family.
I fail to see why you have a problem with this.

I will show you in clear language exactly why I have problem with this. I will now describe the life cycle of a fungus. After I describe that life cycle, you are to answer my question that follows, capisce?

Glossary
Hyphae = microscopic fibers that extent outside of a fungal spore prior to sex.
Mycelium = The actual body of fungus. In dry weather mycelium looks like cotton. In wet weather it looks like white bubblegum.
Diploid = The organism carries around two sets of chromosomes, one from each parent.
Fruiting body = We call them "mushrooms" in normal conversation.
Recombination = During production of zygotes the DNA is constructed by taking a (mostly random) combination of the father's and the mother's chromosomes in the diploid set to form a haploid set in the child.
Heterothallic = the requirement that the parents of an offspring be of opposite sex.
Adaptivity = the speed of change in a population.
Adaption = the existence of change in a population. The noun for this change.
Adaptation = a specific instance of a change, say longer tails or shorter legs.

Life Cycle
Temperature triggers cause a mature mycelium to form into a small knot which later is the growing site for a fruiting body. The function of the fruiting body is to drop spores from a height elevated above the decaying detritus, with the hope that wind or running water will carry the spores away. When a single spore encounters elevated heat and sucrose it grows branching hyphae out of the tip. Each spore is either male or female. The hyphae must encounter hyphae from another spore of the opposite sex to bind. Without this binding, the children never produce a mycelium. But if they do, the mycelium carries a diploid set created by conjunction of the chromosomes of the two parental spores. (In some cases the sets are carried in two separate nuclei in the cells, which is a form of karyogamy). Hyphae and spores are microscopic, by mycelium is easy to find under rotting branches or piles of dead leaves in any given forest.

During the production of spores, recombination takes place on each and every spore created. The parent fruiting body creates a spore by mixing a combination of chromosomes from the two haploid sets. In essence, every single spore which is grown and dropped will be a unique package of genes; a unique package taken from the genes of the grandparents. (There is another organism on earth which does the same -- the human male. Within the testicles of men, recombination takes place at the production of every sperm cell. Thus in every sperm there is a unique set of genes) In the vast majority of cases, spores of the same organism will meet during hyphae growth. In other words, a kind of incest is the norm in fungus. It is possible, though unlikely, that spores from different mycelial growths will combine.

So the life cycle of the fungus can be described as a process where two opposite sex spores must entwine their branches so that the resulting child fungus can carry a diploid set of genes. That child fungus will later mix (re-combine) those sets each time it creates a spore later in its mature life.


The Question chaz must answer

• Fungus does not have a nest to protect.
• Fungus does not have a child to rear.
• Fungus does not provide "protection for its family."
• The two sexes are only differentiated temporarily during the spore stage.

chaz wyman, please explain to the philosophynow forum why many species of fungi engage in heterothallic reproduction.

But evolution treats organisms like an amorphous bucket. IT SELECTS INDIVIDUALS. NOT genes, NOT traits, NOT specific behaviours.

This is dogma. Evolution can also be equally-well described as a competition among genes to replicate. Horizontal gene transfer is strong evidence for this. Life on this planet has taken the route of storing traits in an encoded amino acid chain. Because it has "taken that route" (so to speak) there will be consequences and repercussions. Through geological timespans, these consequences will eventually come to bear on the organisms on this planet. (One consequence is sexual reproduction). The fundamental flaw in your SELECTS-INDIVIDUALS-dogma implies that organisms carry genes around and then they also have other things that are not alleles. If you realize that organisms themselves are the result of the expression of a phenotype from the encoded gene -- then your dogma is rather silly.

Your reasoning in this dogma comes from the mental method were you have decided what the process of natural selection entails through a forgone conclusion, and then you have gone out and collected evidence for that conclusion. That's journalism, not science.

http://books.google.com/books/about/The ... eHTt8hW7UC

Kuznetzova wrote:

But evolution treats organisms like an amorphous bucket. IT SELECTS INDIVIDUALS. NOT genes, NOT traits, NOT specific behaviours.

This is dogma.

This is a fact. If you can't grasp it you can't grasp evolution.
You are mired in naive teleology.

Some creatures die whilst others live. The result of this is evolution - an effect not a cause. Individuals are selected -Not genes, not traits, not behaviours.

If you want to be taken seriously, then you need to be a little less patronising.

Pour a cup of tea and read this...

I'll leave you with one thought

There has been a long-standing, subtle confusion, elegantly expressed by Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini between;
"(1) The claim that evolution is a process in which creatures with adaptive traits are selected and
(2) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures are selected for their adaptive traits."
”[1] This subtle difference is at the heart of the diverse uses and abuses of Darwinism."

Point 1 is right, point 2 is wrong.
It's a confusion and misconception that you express in all your posts about evolution, you are a point 2er.

Kuznetzova wrote:

From the start species have had 50% of their population able to act without the burden of pregnancy, egg laying or child rearing. Males often protect the nest, provide child rearing, and protection for the family.
I fail to see why you have a problem with this.

I will show you in clear language exactly why I have problem with this. I will now describe the life cycle of a fungus. After I describe that life cycle, you are to answer my question that follows, capisce?

Glossary
Hyphae = microscopic fibers that extent outside of a fungal spore prior to sex.
Mycelium = The actual body of fungus. In dry weather mycelium looks like cotton. In wet weather it looks like white bubblegum.
Diploid = The organism carries around two sets of chromosomes, one from each parent.
Fruiting body = We call them "mushrooms" in normal conversation.
Recombination = During production of zygotes the DNA is constructed by taking a (mostly random) combination of the father's and the mother's chromosomes in the diploid set to form a haploid set in the child.
Heterothallic = the requirement that the parents of an offspring be of opposite sex.
Adaptivity = the speed of change in a population.
Adaption = the existence of change in a population. The noun for this change.
Adaptation = a specific instance of a change, say longer tails or shorter legs.

Life Cycle
Temperature triggers cause a mature mycelium to form into a small knot which later is the growing site for a fruiting body. The function of the fruiting body is to drop spores from a height elevated above the decaying detritus, with the hope that wind or running water will carry the spores away. When a single spore encounters elevated heat and sucrose it grows branching hyphae out of the tip. Each spore is either male or female. The hyphae must encounter hyphae from another spore of the opposite sex to bind. Without this binding, the children never produce a mycelium. But if they do, the mycelium carries a diploid set created by conjunction of the chromosomes of the two parental spores. (In some cases the sets are carried in two separate nuclei in the cells, which is a form of karyogamy). Hyphae and spores are microscopic, by mycelium is easy to find under rotting branches or piles of dead leaves in any given forest.

During the production of spores, recombination takes place on each and every spore created. The parent fruiting body creates a spore by mixing a combination of chromosomes from the two haploid sets. In essence, every single spore which is grown and dropped will be a unique package of genes; a unique package taken from the genes of the grandparents. (There is another organism on earth which does the same -- the human male. Within the testicles of men, recombination takes place at the production of every sperm cell. Thus in every sperm there is a unique set of genes) In the vast majority of cases, spores of the same organism will meet during hyphae growth. In other words, a kind of incest is the norm in fungus. It is possible, though unlikely, that spores from different mycelial growths will combine.

So the life cycle of the fungus can be described as a process where two opposite sex spores must entwine their branches so that the resulting child fungus can carry a diploid set of genes. That child fungus will later mix (re-combine) those sets each time it creates a spore later in its mature life.


The Question chaz must answer

• Fungus does not have a nest to protect.
• Fungus does not have a child to rear.
• Fungus does not provide "protection for its family."
• The two sexes are only differentiated temporarily during the spore stage.

chaz wyman, please explain to the philosophynow forum why many species of fungi engage in heterothallic reproduction.

There is nothing to say that the sexual differentiation of the fungi are remotely antecedent to humans.
And my point was how the sexual differentiation of animals has persisted.
Thanks for the effort, but you excel in irrelevance.

The female only serves to provide nutrients and a safe haven for an offspring during a short period. She has contributed to the offspring's dna in equal portion as the male (23 chromosomes each). Now what if we were in the situation where the male was the bearer (in the case of the seahorse) or to the extreme what if it took place outside of either bodies. Will this serve to question the existence/ necessity of the females?

Sexes exist for a simple reason; if you're religious then the reasoning will be for companionship etc, if you are not religious then the reason will be a chance happening via evolution.

Frankly, I don't see why the male species' existence is being questioned. Why do we all exist?

In the end, you know life will be dull without us around

chaz wyman wrote: There is nothing to say that the sexual differentiation of the fungi are remotely antecedent to humans.
And my point was how the sexual differentiation of animals has persisted.

Oh no buddy, don't play this game. I asked you a specific question.
Why do fungi, who have NO nest to protect, NO children to "raise" --- why do they engage in heterothallic reproduction?
Do not dodge this question.
Answer it.


Rest assured, sexual reproduction "persisted" in animals for precisely the same reason it persists in fungus and algae.

chaz wyman wrote: This is a fact. If you can't grasp it you can't grasp evolution.
You are mired in naive teleology.

I perfectly and clearly grasp what you are claiming. You are dogmatically asserting (with no evidence) that selection operates at the level of the individual. We have strong, hard, verified empirical evidence from the field of individuals going completely sterile in order to be worker ants for a colony. AND we have enormous examples of males all over nature, who cannot reproduce themselves at all, lest they go mate with a female from the other half of the population. Thus half of their genes are simply discarded!

I have made no references to teleology. Only to statistics and probability. If I say that natural selection favors something, I mean to say that is happening because it has to happen given statistical laws. I use "favors" as a shorthand for "statistically more probable over a long spans of geological time".

If natural selection is best described as a "selection of individuals" , such selfless non-individualized species (who make a portion of their population go sterile) they should have gone extinct long ago. They have not. And the way to understand the disparity is that evolution will statistically favor those who reproduce the genes with fidelity. The entire of act of sex serves the on-going competition between the genes, not an on-going competition between the individuals. If you think this process is a matter of replicating the INDIVIDUAL, that is demonstrably false among all humans. HUman children are not direct copies of a parent, but children are partially made of one parent, and partially made of the other parent. In a very literal sense, the individual parent was HALF-ERASED !!

My next question to you chaz wyman, is have you read the book The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins?

http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anni ... 0199291152

chaz wyman wrote: There has been a long-standing, subtle confusion, elegantly expressed by Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini between;
"(1) The claim that evolution is a process in which creatures with adaptive traits are selected and
(2) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures are selected for their adaptive traits."
”[1] This subtle difference is at the heart of the diverse uses and abuses of Darwinism."

Point 1 is right, point 2 is wrong.
It's a confusion and misconception that you express in all your posts about evolution, you are a point 2er.

No it is not a confusion nor a misconception. What is happening here is your incapacity to understand that evolution also must give rise to meta-heuristics and meta-evolution. I will give two examples to help you understand what "meta-evolution" means.

1) There are short term gains by not engaging in sexual reproduction, because mating is time-consuming and wasteful and dangerous. Cloning a copy is swift and direct. In the short term, asexual cloning is far better, and it infers an enormous advantage TO THE INDIVIDUAL. But natural selection has been going on for billions of years, and sexual reproduction of all different kinds has dominated in the long haul of history. Fungus uses it to re-combine genes and "mix them up". Flowering plants are hermaphrodites. If a secondary plant does not fertilize the first, the first plant can go ahead and fertilize itself, and clone a copy. (I would love to hear your explanation of that, but you would probably dodge the question as you did before). Over epochs, the asexual cloners have been hit time and time again with situations in their environment that forced them to adapt to changes. They could not adapt. Their genotypes were frozen. Then across the river from them were sexually-reproducing organisms. They took a hit to their populations due to rapid environmental and climatic changes. Unlike the cloners, they overcame and prevailed because recombination of genes (aka "sex") allowed them to adapt faster. Sexual populations adapted, while the cloners went extinct. This process already played out billions of years ago, and now we are in the future with a wide diversity of land-dwelling animals. Those land animals engage in sexual reproduction because they are the progeny of those who prevailed in the Adapt-or-Die-Out game long ago.

This process, whereby populations themselves are selected due to their capacity to maintain their numbers through adversity, and maintain diversity for the purpose of adaption, I have called Meta-Evolution, to differentiate it from regular evolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusocial



2) Chaz wyman, I give you my second example as a homework assignment. Learn to program and create a simulation of an environment in which little block creatures go about in the world and reproduce themselves. Do this on a computer. Make it so that your artificial organisms produce a child with a slight mutation. Run this simulation at full speed for 10 days, and see that natural selection takes place. Good. That was step 1. Understand that the rate of mutation of the offspring is a parameter which you, the programmer, have set arbitrarily in the simulation. Set mutation rate too high, and the population will go extinct. Set it too low, and the population will stagnate and never change. So there is a sweet spot of mutation rate that allows your little ecosystem to happily evolve forever.

Now here is your assignment: Encode the mutation rate directly into the genotype of your organisms themselves. Yes. Literally place a gene into your organisms that determines how mutated their children will be. Try this. In this way evolution itself will decide the mutation rate. Lets talk about the possible scenarios that could play out here,

• A. The mutation rate evolves in random directions. Because of random spikes of very high mutation, the population goes extinct.
• B. The mutation rate quickly evolves higher and higher until the population goes extinct.
• C. The mutation rate naturally evolves towards a "sweet spot", described above.
• D. The mutation rate evolves to zero, and the organisms start making clones of themselves.

So chaz, what do you think? Which one of these four scenarios takes place? A, B, C, or D? Do you know? Have you tried this?

I have tried it myself, and so have many other people who work in theoretical biology. You might surprised to know that part D happens every single time without fail. Yes, the population will rapidly evolve towards zero mutation and then hold it there. Eventually, all genetic lines will get "stuck" at zero, in which case their progeny are direct clones. Then clones make clones and that never ends. These organisms did not choose to do this. Merely the playing out of statistical mathematics forced this to happen. It's not teleology. It's math.

Now here is the punch line, I would like you to evolve two populations in the same simulation. The organisms of the East and the organisms of the West. Separate them in the environment by an unbridgeable wall or a river. The organisms of the East will encode their mutation rate directly into their genotype. The organisms of the West will be forced to evolve with mutation set at the sweet spot rate. Let them evolve in isolation for several days. By that time, the Eastern Organisms will have stopped mutating and are now only making clones. However, the Western Organisms are still mutating.

Now remove the wall between them. Although it may take a long time, the Western Organisms will adapt to the Easterns. By inches, they will find the weaknesses in the Eastern Orgs, and evolve to exploit those weaknesses. Run this simulation long enough, and all Western Orgs will defeat and replace all Eastern Orgs. This will happen every single time you try it. This is not a magic trick. The mutating population always wins because it can adapt.


This principle, whereby adaptive populations supersede and displace stagnant ones, I have called Meta-evolution, to differentiate it from small-scale regular evolution.


Finally, I leave with you a quote and a link to a peer-reviewed Biology journal.

This difficulty, though appearing insuperable, is lessened, or, as I believe, disappears, when it is remembered that selection may be applied to the family, as well as to the individual, and may thus gain the desired end. Breeders of cattle wish the flesh and fat to be well marbled together. An animal thus characterized has been slaughtered, but the breeder has gone with confidence to the same stock and has succeeded.

-- Charles Darwin, 1858

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 09833.html

I think you are a lost cause.
Like any acolyte of a religion you are too mired in its fantasies to see the wood for the trees. You remind me of a religious fundamentalists that responds by dumping Scripture on the screen, rather than argue a case with your brain.

Were you to keep the the title of the thread then you will see that everything I have posted in relevant, whilst you muse on irrelevances.
"Why Men Exist" is not even a scientific question, it's a childish feminist ideological question.
Men do exist, there is no particular purpose to either males or females, though you can describe their function.
Science is about describing the world in ways that explain it. Thus men exist, the question is HOW they continue to exist in relation to other members of their species.

By rejecting selection of the individual, you reject evolution.
Evolution works because environmental conditions prevent individuals from making viable progeny. It is the remaining individuals that survive. No specific gene, behaviour or trait is selected. individuals that are selected come complete with a host of genetic material that has led to their survival, with traits and behaviour that are multifunctional and as a whole contribute to the survival of that organism.
You don't get it.
This is evolution 101, and your usual response (yawn!) is a copy&paste data dump most of which is utterly devoid of relevance to the question.

"..mired in fantasies...." ?? DID YOU EVEN TRY TO READ WHAT I WROTE HERE?

Everybody on this forum can see that I am directly responding to what you say. And I gave clear unambiguous examples of everything I was talking about. You have made no attempt to read nor even respond to any of the points I have made here.

It is now blatantly obvious to everyone on this forum that

Number 1 -- you are no longer responding to direct questions I give to you. You are literally dodging them. You have yet to explain to this forum why fungus engages in heterothallic reproduction. Fungus engaged in this reproduction millions of years ago, and it still does today. I not only gave an explanation, but I explained my explanation in intricate detail for all to read and understand. You, in contrast, just keep repeating your dogma like a broken record.

Number 2 -- You are no longer responding to a host of points I am making. You are no longer responding to clear examples I have given.

Number 3 -- I have provided quotations from Darwin, and copious citations to actual literature in biology that is in support of my points. You have made no attempt to respond to these established points from the literature and from Charles Darwin himself.

Number 4 -- I have no solid indication that you are reading my posts anymore.

chaz wyman --

I asked you a clear, relevant, pointed, unambiguous question: Why do fungus engage in heterothallic reproduction?

You refused to answer this question.

I asked you a clear, relevant, and unambiguous question directly: Have you ever read The Selfish Gene, a book by Richard Dawkins?

You refused to answer this question.