[hmkpoker]

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Hmkpoker asks "why was the two-sex, sperm/egg congress paradigm selected". The answer is that this paradigm was "selected" topically because it was best for the area it covers. Evolution is real; natural selection is real; and progress exists --albeit in spots and spurts. Sheer randomness rules.

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This is simply incorrect. While individual mutations are random, natural selection is not. It's like looking at the individual hands of a poker game and concluding that one's BB/100 over three years is random.

Any phenotypic change that significantly changes reproductive success will have a strong tendency toward natural selection. There's nothing random about that. I have a very, very hard time believing that sexual reproduction didn't have a MASSIVE influence on reproductive success. The sex drive is about as important as eating and survival, and it's so radically different than asexual reproduction that I can't imagine it not having a significant impact. The overwhelming majority of the animal kingdom has genders, so there is almost certainly something advantageous to it (otherwise it would never have been selected). I just didn't understand what that something was.