[Borodog]

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While most of the biomass might be locked up in bacteria, like most of the mass of the universe is locked up in dark matter, that doesn't mean the rest isn't "important" or at the very least, begging for explanation, which is what your original post in this thread implied.

[/ QUOTE ](Oh brother.) I did not imply that "our" part of the story is not important or that sexual/two-sex reproduction isn't interesting.

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Uh, yes, you did:

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Here's something I don't understand about natural selection: why was the two-sex, sperm/egg congress paradigm selected? Many species have the ability to reproduce asexually, and I would think that that's more advantageous to survival as it's simpler. Can anyone shed some light on this?

[/ QUOTE ]Dear hmkpoker,

Start with the premise that humans are a small part of mammals who are a small part of vertebrates who are a tiny, tiny part of the fauna extant on earth -- and that the "paradigm" of "two-sex, sperm/egg congress" is not really that frequent.

Homo Sapiens is at the extreme right tail of the distribution of Life, as prominent an example of cosmic variance as any. Human "paradigms" are not typical of the ways of Life on Earth at all.

Regards,

Mickey Brausch

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It has been advocated here that "our" model is the most successful in nature -- but the numbers are not with us. It's asserted that Man is but a wiglet of a very large bush, and that the overwhelming majority of the bush couldn't care less about penises and vaginas.

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You're doing it again.

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Coupled with the assertion that evolution does not necesarily mean "progress" (i.e. a march towards more complexity of "perfection"), except topically, if at all, and we have something like a whim of history, as far as the sexual model of animals is concerned.

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a) I have no idea what sex has to do with the "progress" argument, and
b) It has been pointed out repeatedly that the sheer numbers of asexually reproducers do not make sexual reproduction a thing to be airily dismissed, so why do you keep trying to do it? In other words, why do you keep trying to kill my man's thread? [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]