Reviewed at August 26, 2010 - Ver. 2.1
An Open Letter about Natural and Sexual Selection
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Dear Mr. Sander van Doorn,
I have read the article in the Science Magazine entitled On the Origin of Species by Natural and Sexual Selection (1) and in my opinion it was the best article I ever read about the subject. The greatest thing I find, is the fact that you don’t need the word diversity to explain the value of Sexual Selection, a real breakthrough in the common sense panorama. And more important, it is the transformation of Sexual Selection from a mere appendix of Natural Selection, into its greatest product. Knowing that there are people writing many things about the subject, I will try to contribute to your article following the spirit that I congratulated before, in a simple and easily understanding form. So, there are my critical points:
Complexity In my opinion, speciation cannot be interpreted without sexual selection, and you can easily identify this, trough the great increase of complexity, in the tree of life. The tree of life gives you two main systems of cellular life, the Prokaryotes (bacteria, archaea) and the Eukaryotes. There is no need for extra attention to realize that the Prokaryote organisms had never developed to significant complexity. The Eukaryotes are the category of all complex organisms that you have today, and at the same time, it is contrasting the method of reproduction between Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes.
Schematics Because these subjects had to live in the common sense domain, we can say that Natural Selection has its own popular scheme. We listen to many times expressions as “The survival of the fittest”, which works as a metaphor for the Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The big problem is that there is no good metaphor for Sexual Selection, and the clumsy “Genetic variation” never came to be more than a sound bite! Now I ask. Would not be wonderful to have a good metaphor for Sexual Selection? Like the one for Natural Selection, that simple means continuous adaptation through selection. One that everyone grasps. Why not? Well, the interesting thing is that you don’t need another metaphor! “The survival of the fittest” works for both albeit in a slight different way, because Natural and Sexual Selection are -1-
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