IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wrk/wcreta/07.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Why Sex? and Why Only in Pairs?

Author

Listed:
  • Perry, Motty

    (Department of Economics, University of Warwick)

  • Reny, Philip J.

    (Department of Economics, The University of Chicago)

  • Robson, Arthur J.

    (Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University)

Abstract

Understanding the purpose of sex remains one of the most important unresolved problems in evolutionary biology. The difficulty is not that there are too few theories of sex, the difficulty is that there are too many and none stand out. To distinguish between theories we suggest the following question: Why are there no triparental species in which an offspring is composed of the genetic material of three individuals? A successful theory should confer an advantage to biparental sex over asexual reproduction without conferring an even greater advantage to triparental sex. We pose our question in the context of two leading theories of sex, the (deterministic) mutational hypothesis that sex reduces the rate at which harmful mutations accumulate, and the red queen hypothesis that sex reduces the impact of parasitic attack by increasing genotypic variability. We show that the mutational hypothesis fails to provide an answer to the question because it implies that triparental sex dominates biparental sex, so the latter should never be observed. In contrast, we show that the red queen hypothesis is able to explain biparental sex without conferring an even greater advantage to triparental sex.

Suggested Citation

  • Perry, Motty & Reny, Philip J. & Robson, Arthur J., 2015. "Why Sex? and Why Only in Pairs?," CRETA Online Discussion Paper Series 07, Centre for Research in Economic Theory and its Applications CRETA.
  • Handle: RePEc:wrk:wcreta:07
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/creta/papers/manage/07-why_sex_and_why_only_in_pairs.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Francesconi, Marco & Ghiglino, Christian & Perry, Motty, 2016. "An evolutionary theory of monogamy," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 166(C), pages 605-628.
    2. Alger, Ingela & Cox, Donald, 2020. "Evolution of the Family: Theory and Implications for Economics," IAST Working Papers 20-109, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST).

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wrk:wcreta:07. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Margaret Nash (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dewaruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.