Camaban

Hey.

Wondering if anyone had any info on the evolution of the first gender-based forms. (links, etc)

searching google, and getting rather irritated at the combination of feminist links, and language links.

Thanks

pz

I'm not sure what you mean by "gender-based forms." You mean like yeast mating types?

capnkirk

Methinks the reason that you are getting feminist links is that you have fallen prey to the PC substitution of "gender" for "sex".


You ARE searching for the evolutional origins of sexual reproduction, aren't you? While I have read extensively about the competitive advantages of sexual reproduction (essentially the advantages issuing from the constant re-pairing of DNA strands contributed by two "parents" as compared with the lack of new material inherent in the DNA "cloning" method associated with asexual reproduction.) I can't recall any study into the origins of same.

Try some new searches using biological terminology rather than PC terminology and I think you will have better results.

Doubting Didymus

I am assuming you mean multicellular eukaryotes, and among these, would prefer to ignore multi-gendered unberably compicated fungi sexual types and equally absurd mating habits. (i/e/ you want to know about animal and plant style male-female gendering)

The answer depends on what you are looking for, exactly. Do you want the actual real history of gender evolution (fossil evidence, etc?) or is your question simply "how could it become so" (that is, you want to show a creationist how separate genders might gradually evolve), in which case you want a hypothetical scenario of a possible evolutionsry pathway. I wrote one of these for Luvluv a while back, which I might fetch for you. You must understand that it is not intended to be historical fact, nor theoretical likelyhood. It is a 'just so story', and must be read as such. 'Just so stories' have a bad rap in my opinion. I find them useful educational tools, provided that they are taken as hypothetical scenarios and not accurate accounts.

One moment please.

Doubting Didymus

Here is the thread where I discuss this topic with luvluv. Again, you must remember that I am hypothesising a theoretically possible scenario, and not relaying any kind of scientific consensus.

Dr.GH

You might take a look at these:

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/sex.html

http://lifesci.ucsb.edu/EEMB/faculty...lications.html

Doubting Didymus

From Dr GH's first link:

This would require animals, plants, and also fungi to have all derived sex from the same source. I'm no expert, but that sounds a bit iffy to me. Fungus sex is so different to animal and plant sex, that I find it hard to picture them all deriving from the same ancestor. Is there any actual historical data about early gendered beings?

pz

Different in detail, but not in the cellular core of the process: meiosis. That's the common detail that suggests there was a single origin.

Doubting Didymus

Aaah. I think we're approaching the problem from different angles. What I'm thinking of is the evolution of gender, being specifically internally incompatible breeding types that reproduce only with certain other breeding types. I'm thinking of the evolution of male/female (or in fungi, breeding type 1, breeding type 2, breeding type 3 and breeding type whatever the hell).

As opposed to the evolution of sex itself, this presents a slightly different problem, as is often raised by creationists. The question on the lips of evolution denyers is: what did the first male breed with? How did male and female manage to appear at the same time? Where the evolution of sexual recombination does not have these problems. Everything in the meiotic world can still breed with everything else.

I (obviously) agree that the common ancestor of plants animals and fungi was a meiotically (real word? who cares!) reproducing population. What I doubt is that that population posessed interspecific breeding types, though I may still be wrong.

Camaban

the first sexually reproducing ones, yes.

thanks for the links. will enjoy them.

(On another note, I managed to find something, that explained it in detail... on the downside, I didn't understand a word of it, on the upside, at least one person had an inkling.... I really should have taken biology and paid attention during math at school)