Perry, Motty, Reny, Philip J. and Robson, Arthur J. (2015) Why sex? and why only in pairs? Working Paper. Coventry: Department of Economics, University of Warwick. Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (WERPS) (1092). (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Understanding the purpose of sex remains one of the most important unresolved problems in evolutionary biology. The difficulty is not that there are too few theories of sex, the difficulty is that there are too many and none stand out. To distinguish between theories we suggest the following question: Why are there no triparental species in which an offspring is composed of the genetic material of three individuals? A successful theory should confer an advantage to biparental sex over asexual reproduction without conferring an even greater advantage to triparental sex. We pose our question in the context of two leading theories of sex, the (deterministic) mutational hypothesis that sex reduces the rate at which harmful mutations accumulate, and the red queen hypothesis that sex reduces the impact of parasitic attack by increasing genotypic variability. We show that the mutational hypothesis fails to provide an answer to the question because it implies that triparental sex dominates biparental sex, so the latter should never be observed. In contrast, we show that the red queen hypothesis is able to explain biparental sex without conferring an even greater advantage to triparental sex.

Item Type:	Working or Discussion Paper (Working Paper)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Economics
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Sex
Series Name:	Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (WERPS)
Publisher:	Department of Economics, University of Warwick
Place of Publication:	Coventry
ISSN:	0083-7350
Official Date:	December 2015
Dates:	Date Event December 2015 Published
Number:	1092
Number of Pages:	25
Institution:	University of Warwick
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access (Creative Commons)
Funder:	Israel Science Foundation (ISF), Economic and Social Research Council (Great Britain) (ESRC), National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF), Canada Research Chairs (CRC), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
Grant number:	0321548 (ISF), ES/K006347/1 (ESRC), SES-1227506 (NSF)
Version or Related Resource:	This paper also appears as CRETA Discussion Paper No: 7
Related URLs:	Other

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