An Exception
An Exception
Where Small Organisms Suppress Randomness
This chapter discusses how the sexual cycle varies in a general way depending on the size and complexity of organisms. Natural selection has burnished the sexual system so that in each generation the degree of variation in the offspring is optimal—not too little and not too much—which allows natural selection to take place and makes evolutionary progress possible. However, in many simpler, small organisms this sexual variation-control mechanism can be turned on and off: periods of sexual reproduction will be interspersed with periods of asexual reproduction. In larger forms (with some rare exceptions) only the sexual route is possible. And it is only in the sexual cycle through recombination that the all-important controlled variation that is so essential for evolutionary progress is produced.
Keywords: sexual cycle, sex, asexual production, evolutionary biology, biological randomness, natural selection
Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
