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JGWeissman comments on "Sex Is Always Well Worth Its Two-Fold Cost" - Less Wrong
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Comments (32)
It is clear that the article is talking about genetic evolution, so counterexamples in cultural evolution are not a point against it.
It would be - with a proper understanding of the processes in question.
If you think that is so, demonstrate it by providing the proper understanding. But it seems to me that you are criticizing the article by assigning different meanings to its words than the author intended and effectively communicated to everyone who is not looking for indefensible interpretations.
It's a non-trivial request. However, I don't think I disagree with what the paper actually says. Evolutionary stability - for me - ususally refers to the concept of an Evolutionarily Stable Stratgey. If multi-parental sex could not be involved in these, then that would be interesting.
However - despite the section titles - the paper says nothing about this issue. For a start it DEFINES "multiple sexes" as "an equal sharing of the offspring's genome between more than two parent organisms". Huh? You are certainly correct that I am not using words the way the authors do. However, that is because they are stringing ordinary English words together into esoteric technical terms. Then it defines stability in such a way that it refers to a the genes of a genetically uniform population. Whether a uniform gene pool is stable against invasion is different from the more-conventional question of whether a population can exhibit stable strategies.
Lastly, when they say "Three and more sexes can not be evolutionary stable" all they mean is "three and more sexes can not be evolutionary stable in our obviously extremely-limited model". The second conclusion is fine by me.