Eli5: We have a dna correction system to avoid variations, but, sexual reproduction to promote variations. So, Are variations good?
In: Biology
The three main ideas amongst biologists about the way sexual reproduction helps are:
* It ensures that the population remains genetically diverse, so that alleles that are useless now but might be beneficial later will survive, or that new useful combinations of alleles can occasionally come up (eg, the genes for “6 foot 5” and “trust fund”, each individually rare, might come together at some point).
* It evolved as a way to “out-evolve” fast-evolving parasites, by ensuring that each new generation presents a new problem for the parasites to solve (eg, parasites this year may have evolved to successfully take advantage of “6 foot 5, trust fund” individuals, but the next generation those alleles are all mixed up and the parasites have to evolve a new strategy).
* Neither of these ideas are satisfactory, and this is an unsolved problem in biology.
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