(November 4, 2014 at 8:57 pm)Reader Wrote: Thank you! Yes, this is the answer I was looking for! Thanks for clarifying it in layman's terms. A couple of more questions if you don't mind ... I asked this above in another post, but will ask here again a different way. So, if we started off as one "sex" ... how did we get to two sexes? How many of the one "sex" did we have until we evolved another to be able to reproduce? Would the first "sex" have died off before more could be "made"? Does that makes sense? Trying to think this through before we talk about it in class.
The idea is that genders didn't evolve, sex itself did. So before sexual reproduction, there were no "male" or "female." Genders were a product of sexual reproduction evolving. Male and female are just the two carriers of genetic information. The advantage is that with the genetic information coming from two different places, there is a greater variation, and therefore a greater possibility of passing on advantageous information.
My guess is that there is a sweet spot. If reproduction required three parents instead of two, the advantage in extra genetic information might be outweighed by the difficulty in gaining a third partner.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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