It Takes Two to Tango

Aunali Khaku

In his textbook titled "Evolution", Mark Ridley, an acclaimed evolutionist, starts

chapter thirteen with the sentence: "The existence of sex is an outstanding,
unsolved problem in Evolutionary biology." After explaining why he thinks sexual
reproduction is problematic for evolution, Ridley proposes four hypotheses by
which sexual reproduction could have arisen. He however concludes the argument by
declaring: "It is uncertain how sex is adaptive." In my essay I hope to delve
further into the problem of sex and challenge the current evolutionary
explanations for it.

Ridley and other evolutionists think sex is problematic because it is less

efficient than asexual reproduction. They reason that with everything else being
equal, an asexual organism will proliferate twice as fast as a sexual organism.
Hence in a population where both asexual and sexual individuals exist, the asexual
organisms will have higher fitness than sexual organisms and hence sexual
organisms would be eliminated. While I have no problem with the idea that sexual
reproduction is too expensive and maladaptive to be explained by evolution, I
think that sexual reproduction poses an even larger challenge ignored by most
evolutionists. How did sex arise in the first place?

Since sex is absent in primitive organisms, it must have been a new innovation.
Hence sex either arose by evolution or it was designed. The theory of evolution
suggests that new variations arise in nature by mutations. Hence, according to
the theory of evolution, a mutant must have arisen in a population of asexual
organisms that had the ability to reproduce sexually. The problem however is that
sexual reproduction is not simply a matter of a particular gene mutating to form a
new protein. Sex, like many other biochemical phenomena, requires numerous new
proteins arranged in novel ways. It is very unlikely that a single mutation event
would be able to convert an asexual organism into a sexual organism. Yet gradual
mutations to existing proteins could not have developed proteins required in
sexual reproduction as intermediate organisms which such mutations would have no
advantage over others.

Nevertheless, for the sake of argument let us assume that somewhere along the line
a sexual organism did arise. How would it proliferate? As the saying goes: "it
takes two to tango" so without a complimentary sexual partner, the new mutant
would die off without any offspring. Thus in order to accept that sexual
reproduction arose by chance we have to believe that a minimum of at least two
sexual organisms arose simultaneously in the same community and that they managed
to find each other and engage in sexual reproduction. In fact since life is a
biochemical phenomenon, we have to further realize that for this sexual pair to be
able to produce an offspring, the minimum requirement would be that their sexual
structures (assemblies of proteins) be exactly complimentary not only in the
physical, but also in the biochemical sense. That is to say that apart from the
fact that the strictures would have to fit together, the gametes (think egg and
sperm) would have to be such that they attract each other and by a biochemical
process, penetrate and give rise to a viable zygote. For all practical purposes,
the probability that two organisms evolve such strikingly complimentary structures
and gametes simultaneously is nil.

But even if we assume that somehow all this did happen, the problem still remains.
For sex now to become fixed, it would have to displace asexual reproduction which
as demonstrated by Ridley is a big problem facing evolutionary biologists.
Despite all these issues, in the presence of overwhelming evidence to suggest the
contrary, evolutionary biologists continue to promulgate the outdated and
fallacious ideas of Darwinism in the name of science.

Aunali khaku