Why We Have Sex: It's Cleansing

LiveScience.com ^ | 3/2/06 | Ker Than

[LiteKeeper]

YEC INTREP

[Zuben Elgenubi]

heehee

[Zuben Elgenubi]

LOL good one.

[derllak]

I knock you upside your head with a frying pan and all you can say is "heehee"? You like? You want some more? Come on, I'll pound you til the cows come home if you want me to! :P

[Zuben Elgenubi]

LOL. That's what I like about Free Republic. It's just like home!

[derllak]

ROFL! That'll teach you to stay off the sex threads!

[plain talk]

Those are all good questions which are impossible for anyone to answer fully while living on this earth. There is only possible way, though, to obtain answers to those questions. And that is to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and lay claim to the eternal life promised to all who believe.

"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." - Matthew 7:13-14

[grey_whiskers]

I will have none of this filth! (Besides, the thread's already too long gone for deploying the ping list.)

Yes, too far gone for the ping list, but not for a couple of annoying questions, if Ichneumon will oblige...?

1. Has anyone thought to follow up with studies (even retrospective reviews) of the rate of speciation between say, the starfish, cactus, etc., and similarly-environmentally-placed compatriots which do sexually reproduce?

2. Speaking of cacti, why then do saguaro have flowers? Is there a list of which cacti are asexual and which are not; and what point did their DNA diverge...?

3. (Boring pointless analogy here...if whales' progenitors were once land mammals, and returned to the sea, were the forbears of the current crop of asexual multicellular, macroscopic organisms all asexual too, or was there an similar "retrograde" motion? "Not this millenium, we all have headaches!" )

Sorry, can't think of any puns.

Cheers!

[PatrickHenry]

This may answer some of your questions. If not, it's interesting anyway:
Ichneumon's post 320 on the evolution of sexual reproduction.

[grey_whiskers]

Thanks, I'd read that already.

You're right, it didn't answer my questions, which tend to center more on specific rates and mechanisms of speciation. My first love was Chemical Kinetics, and reaction rate theory, so anything having to do with predicting / controlling rates of things is irresistible to me.

All the same, thanks for the quick and courteous reply.

Full Disclosure: I asked about saguaro for two reasons:
1) they're the cacti seen in the Road-Runner and Coyote cartoons
2) I live in Phoenix, and they are indigenous to the Sonoran Desert. I've seen their flowers, and so had no idea ANY cacti were asexual...

Cheers!