National Geographic Buzz Kill
Sex speeds up evolution (yay!) but only if you're yeast (boo!). Yes, National Geographic--the place where so many of us first oggled boobies--teasingly promised a new reason to do it with its headline "Sex Speeds Up Evolution, Study Finds," only to disappoint with a piece about how organisms that can reproduce sexually and asexually evolve more quickly with the former.
...a team of scientists created a mutant strain of yeast that, unlike normal yeast, was unable to divide into the sexual spores that allow yeast to engage in sexual reproduction. Yeast can reproduce either sexually or asexually.
When testing this mutant strain in stress-free conditions, the scientists found that it performed as well as normal yeast. In more extreme conditions, however, the normal yeast grew faster than the asexual mutants.
What remains unanswered is how exactly do yeast, um, do it?
3 Comments:
why don't we just do it in the brew...
Anonymous has brought up an interesting point! If yeast can have sex and evolve then is it possible to produce alcohol that actually has sex? Imagine the marketing potential of that.
Rob
Sex speeding up evolution seems to making the rounds.
Perhaps I'm all wrong about this, but I have wondered long and hard why creationism seems to important to fundamentalists.
Then again it makes you wonder, why they are so dead against cloning? No sex at all, and you could weed out the mutants, ie. no evolution...
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