Stiff Competition for Mating among Males Facilitates a Genetically Sound Population

Thought Problem: Stiff Competition for Mating among Males Facilitates a Genetically Sound Population
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Thought Problem: Stiff Competition for Mating among Males Facilitates a Genetically Sound Population
The fundamental question that spans many discussions on the evolution of sex has been to understand the cost of sex, raising further debates among evolutionary biologists on the paradox of sexuality. In the contradiction of sex, females in sexual populations are only as efficient as asexual people. Early postulations found that sexual reproduction is inefficient compared to asexual reproduction due to the cost of sex (Hartfied, 2016). Sexual reproduction poses many challenges, including the risks of transmission of diseases during mating, loss of heterozygosity, cost of finding preferred mates selection, and the chance of not finding mates (Grieshop et al., 2021). Besides, the overall numbers of females produced in asexual populations are double those made in sexual people. To offset the cost of sex in sexual people and increase the numbers of females, males would be required to contribute to raising offspring. Similarly, paying for the cost of sex has evolutionarily been possible by generating greater variations through the processes of segregation and recombination.
Natural processes of sex selection and recombination have emerged as powerful evolutionary tools supporting the Red Queen hypothesis, which suggests that members in asexual reproduction are more prone to extinction due to the constant accumulation of deleterious traits. In the Red Queen hypothesis, species adapt and evolve for survival since other competing organisms are also constantly changing, leading to the concept of the “arms race” between hosts and parasites (Schenk et al., 2020). Developments in debates on sex have witnessed the emergence of ideas that support earlier theories, such as Muller’s Rachet. According to the Fisher-Muller hypothesis, sex selection allows the recombination of desirable genes from different individuals in an offspring (Park et al., 2018). In this sense, sexual reproduction results in the generation of novel allelic combinations to produce different genotypes that proffer greater fitness in an individual. Howeve...