'0':'')+lm_hour; As they move into adulthood, nearly half of these children (or even … Evolution is fascinating because it attempts to answer one of the most basic human questions: Where did life, and human beings, come from? F… Evidence for this explanation for the evolution of sex is provided by comparison of the rate of molecular evolution of genes for kinases and immunoglobulins in the immune system with genes coding other proteins. [RETURN TO TEXT], [17]  Cartwright, John, Evolution and Human Behavior, Macmillan, London, p. 96, 2000. Sex would not have evolved, and been retained, unless it had some advantage”[8] (emp. They found even in countries promoting gender equality, mating preferences still varied. To appreciate this, compare a sexually reproducing female with one that reproduces asexually. [RETURN TO TEXT], [28]  Maddox, Ref. A single individual cannot evolve alone; evolution is the process of changing the gene frequencies within a gene pool. '0':'')+lm_month; Gender Role in Evolution . [RETURN TO TEXT], [3]  Ridley, Mark, The Cooperative Gene, The Free Press, New York, pp. How can “old” people produce “young” babies? Asexual organisms, as they continue to accumulate mutations, face the unpleasant prospect of eventually becoming both unable to reproduce and unviable-neither of which would be at all helpful to evolution. Yet doing so provides no automatic guarantee of winning the struggle known as “survival of the fittest.”  “Nature,” said the eminent British poet Lord Tennyson, is “red in tooth and claw.”  Currently, the Red Queen Hypothesis seems to be the favorite of evolutionists worldwide in attempting to explain the reason as to the “why” of sex. Faye Flam’s Carnal Knowledge column appears Sundays in The Seattle Times. [12]  Williams’ idea was that sexual reproduction introduced genetic variety in order to enable genes to survive in changing or novel environments. The biological approach's explanation for why men and women are different. In certain lower forms of animals (e.g., hydra), and in yeasts, budding is a common form of asexual reproduction as a small protuberance on the surface of the parent cell increases in size until a wall forms to separate the new individual (the bud) from the parent. Sexual selection theory helped Darwin explain many traits, especially in males, that otherwise seemed maladaptive. Not only is an intricate process required to produce a sperm or egg cell in the first place via meiosis, but another equally intricate mechanism also is required to rejoin the genetic information during fertilization in order to produce the zygote, which will become the embryo, which will become the fetus, which eventually will become the newborn. Lewis Thomas, the highly regarded medical doctor who served for many years as the president and chancellor of the prestigious Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, was unable to contain either his enthusiasm or his praise for the system we know as “sexual reproduction.”  In his book, The Medusa and the Snail, he wrote about the “miracle” of how one sperm cell forms with one egg cell to produce the cell we know as a zygote, which, nine months later, will become a newborn human being. Conspicuous viewers must be aware of what the media is presenting to them, and make sure they're not actively participating in a culture of oppression. Dobzhansky and his co-authors commented on this ironic difficulty in their book, Evolution: Asexual reproduction is the formation of new individuals from cells of only one parent, without gamete formation or fertilization by another member of the species. Why is this the case? [RETURN TO TEXT], Brad Harrub is a graduate of Kentucky Wesleyan College, where he earned a B.S. He currently serves as the Director of Scientific Information at Apologetics Press, and as associate editor of Reason & Revelation. [RETURN TO TEXT], [45]  Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, Ref. Though plus and minus create the equal-sized sex cells, plus mates only with minus and minus with plus. C. Rasa and E. Voland, Chapman and Hall, London, p. 4, 1989. Niles Eldridge, a staunch evolutionist from the American Museum of Natural History, has declared: “Sex occurs in all major groups of life.”[7]. In addressing this very issue, Maddox asked quizzically: Exactly our point! But if you’re isogamous, you’re exchanging same-sized gametes instead of sperm and eggs. As it turns out, the common “survival of the fittest” mentality cannot begin to explain the high cost of first evolving, and then maintaining, the sexual apparatus. In a landmark article published in 1989, Bernstein, Hopf, and Michod suggested that they had discovered the answer: DNA can be damaged in at least two ways. He also earned a Ph.D. in neurobiology and anatomy from the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. 14, p. 99. With a bunch of blabber talk, with no real explanation. The Evolution of Diversity. According to scientists, the very first organisms to dare engage in sex were more like Adam and Steve than Adam and Eve. lm_year=a.getYear();lm_year=((lm_year<1000)? 14, p. 97. Evolutionists have practically been forced to concede that there must be “some advantage” to a system as physiologically and energetically complex as sex-as Mark Ridley admitted when he wrote: “...[I]t is highly likely that sex has some advantage, and that the advantage is big. Genderrefers to the concepts o masculine and feminine whereas sex is the biological fact of being a male or female. Sexual reproduction, on the other hand, would be like purchasing a small number of tickets, but giving each of them a different number. [Commonly known as Muller’s Ratchet hypothesis, the mechanism operates like a downward ratchet on asexual populations with any deleterious mutation that occurs in a vertically transmitted organism.]. [Somatic cells reproduce via the process of mitosis, which maintains the species’ standard chromosome number; gametes are produced via the process of meiosis, which halves that number. A very large number of people do not believe this, which is something that keeps evolution in the news. [RETURN TO TEXT], [42]  Mayr, Ernst, Ref. “It’s a little like using a condom,” says Hurst. 88,103,107. 3, p. 254. Regeneration is another form of asexual reproduction that allows organisms (e.g. Why, then, does sex exist? In doing so, they offer clues to the mystery of why and how the sexes ever evolved. How could nature evolve a female member of a species that produces eggs and is internally equipped to nourish a growing embryo, while at the same time evolving a male member that produces motile sperm cells? It states men have evolved a greater desire to have causal sex in order to produce as many offspring as possible to pass on their genes. In sexual organisms, problems also can arise in regard to tissue rejection between the mother and the newly formed embryo. [RETURN TO TEXT], Bert Thompson is a graduate of Abilene Christian University, where he earned a B.S. [RETURN TO TEXT], [40]  Grass�, Pierre-Paul, Ref. Many organisms, including some fungi, algae and single-celled pond-swimmers, still practice isogamy. Evolutionary biology is unable to reveal why animals would abandon asexual reproduction in favor of more costly and inefficient sexual reproduction. The essential idea behind the Lottery Principle is that since sex introduces variability, organisms would have a better chance of producing offspring that will survive if they reproduce a range of types rather than merely more of the same. Evolutionists freely admit that the origin of the sexual process remains one of the most difficult problems in biology. Without sexes, you wouldn’t have to limit your choice of a mate to half the population. [RETURN TO TEXT], [12]  Williams, George C., Sex and Evolution: in the Monographs in Population Biology series, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1975. Let's celebrate the natural variety of human existence! In an asexual organism, by definition, any mutation that occurs in one generation will be passed on automatically to the next. Bonnie G. Smith. We suggest that there is no naturalistic explanation that can account for the origin and maintenance of sex. As Cartwright put it: But, as Cartwright went on to admit: “This theory is not without its problems and critics.”[25]  One of those problems, expressed by Mark Ridley (no kin to Matt), is: “We do not know for sure that sex exists to purge bad genes.”[26]  No, we certainly do not! In his book, The Masterpiece of Nature: The Evolution of Genetics and Sexuality, Graham Bell described the dilemma in the following manner: The same year that Bell released his book, well-known evolutionist Philip Kitcher noted: “Despite some ingenious suggestions by orthodox Darwinians, there is no convincing Darwinian history for the emergence of sexual reproduction.”[2]  Evolutionists since have freely admitted that the origin of gender and sexual reproduction still remains one of the most difficult problems in biology (see, for example, Maynard-Smith, 1986, p. 35). [For an excellent, up-to-date description of the complicated, two-part process by which meiosis occurs, see Mayr[42]] Once meiosis has taken place. In a speech presented at Hobart College several years ago, the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould spoke out in a somewhat militant fashion about the subject when he said: All of this raises the question:  If mutations are not the cause of evolutionary change, then what is? Yet, we never learn exactly when or how independent male and female sexes originated. lm_second=a.getSeconds();lm_second=((lm_second<10)? Some organisms do expand their sexual options by having many sexes — 100 for some pond-swimming protozoans. Somewhere along this evolutionary path, both males and females were required in order to ensure the procreation that was necessary to further the existence of a particular species. The famous Stanford University geneticist, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza (who is the head of the International Human Genome Project), addressed this fact when he wrote: In addressing the complete ineffectiveness of mutations as an alleged evolutionary mechanism, Dr. Grass� observed: Grass� is not the only prominent evolutionist to take such a view in regard to mutations as an ineffectual driving force for evolution. [RETURN TO TEXT], [30]  Cartwright, John, Ref. We will have more to say about both processes later.]. There is the added problem related to the two different types of cell division we mentioned earlier-mitosis and meiosis. And the critical nature of meiosis to life as we know it has been acknowledged (albeit perhaps begrudgingly) even by evolutionists. How did sex come to exist? Yet there is an even more important question than why sex exists. If, as evolutionists have argued, there is a materialistic answer for everything, then the question should be answered:  Why sex? 1, p. 54. [RETURN TO TEXT], [15]  Reichenbach, Bruce and V. Elving Anderson, On Behalf of God, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, p. 18. Michod, The Evolution of Sex: DNA Repair Hypothesis, The Sociobiology of Sexual and Reproductive Strategies, ed. The origin and maintenance of sex and recombination is not easily explained by natural selection. It is the complexity of this process, and the manner in which it is copied from generation to generation, which practically drove Mark Ridley to distraction in The Cooperative Gene. 5, p. 60. [RETURN TO TEXT], [5]  Crow, J.F., The Importance of Recombination, The Evolution of Sex: An Examination of Current Ideas, ed. The process of evolution occurs only in populations and not in individuals. Exactly how did we arrive at two separate genders-each with its own physiology? If we all descended from these single-celled creatures, as Margulis and Sagan have suggested, then why was the simple-yet-efficient method of asexual reproduction set aside in favor of sexual reproduction? What is Gender? [RETURN TO TEXT], [41]  Gould, Stephen Jay, Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?, speech presented at Hobart College, February 14, 1980; as quoted in Luther D. Sunderland, Darwin’s Enigma, Master Books, San Diego, CA, 1984. Evolutionists adhere to the view that the first organisms on Earth were asexual, and thus they believe that, during billions of years of Earth history, asexual organisms experienced numerous beneficial mutations that caused them to evolve into sexual organisms. Evidence for the biological approach and its views on gender development. '0':'')+lm_day; lm_day=a.getDate();lm_day=((lm_day<10)? [RETURN TO TEXT], [18]  Grass�, Pierre-Paul, Evolution of Living Organisms, Academic Press, New York, p. 87, 1977. Five forces can cause genetic variation and evolution in a population: mutations, natural selection, genetic drift, genetic hitchhiking, and gene flow. var a; The origin and maintenance of sex and recombination is not easily explained by natural selection. degree in biology. During mitosis, all of the chromosomes are copied and passed on from the parent cell to the daughter cells. It is one thing to develop a theory or hypothesis to explain something that already exists, but it is entirely another to develop a theory or hypothesis to explain why that something (in this case, sex) does exist. • The condition of being female or male; biological sex. [RETURN TO TEXT], [9]  Maddox, John, What Remains to be Discovered, The Free Press, New York, p. 252, 1998. document.write(lm_day+' '+monthName[lm_month-1]+' '+lm_year); [RETURN TO TEXT], [29]  Ridley, Ref. iology texts illustrate amoebas evolving into intermediate organisms, which then give rise to amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and, eventually, humans. monthName[2] = 'March' In his book, Evolution and Human Behavior, John Cartwright concluded: Indeed, the evidence does suggest “that species go for vast periods of time without changing much.”  Consider the following admission in light of that point. Such pickiness is an enormous paradox, says Laurence Hurst, a biologist at the University of Bath in England. According to scientists, the very first organisms to dare engage in sex were more like Adam and Steve than Adam and Eve. [RETURN TO TEXT], [49]  Hoffman, Banesh, Albert Einstein, New American Library, p. 73. Or, second, a mutation can occur via errors during the replication process itself. monthName[1] = 'February' When asked whether the future of gender was evolution and extinction, Barker, Nyong’o, Wallace and Bornstein all said they hoped for extinction. Why are babies born young? For some, that situation set the stage for that great seismic shift when living things began to emerge as male and female, thus ushering in everything from the Age of Chivalry to divorce court. Michod and Levin, Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA, p. 35, 1988. starfish and salamanders) to replace injured or lost parts. From an evolutionary perspective, it is beneficial … It is little wonder that, in their more candid moments, evolutionists admit, as Ackerman eventually did, that “when it comes to sex, we inhabit a mystery.”[47]. Some young boys show an early preference for dressing and behaving as girls; some young girls are convinced they should be boys. [RETURN TO TEXT], [2]  Bell, Ref. But the change of a single-celled, asexual prokaryote (like a bacterium) into a multi-celled, sexual eukaryote would not be a “magical” process carried out by just a few, well-chosen beneficial mutations (as if nature had the power to “choose” anything!). 3, p. 109. In his book, The Red Queen,[23] Matt Ridley compared it to what occurs when you photocopy a document, then photocopy the photocopy, and then photocopy that photocopy, etc. These new unfriendly mitochondria could start to spread through the human population at our expense. lm_month=a.getMonth()+1;lm_month=((lm_month<10)? 15, pp. We would like to discuss each briefly. ((lm_year<70)?2000:1900):0)+lm_year; '0':'')+lm_minute; Yet if that is the case, why, then, have the bacteria themselves remained virtually unchanged—from an evolutionary viewpoint—for billions of years of Earth history? degree in biology. How does the theory of evolution explain the formation of genders within most species? Evolutionists suggest otherwise. And how can evolution (via natural selection) explain it? Exactly how did we arrive at two separate genders-each with its own physiology? Evolution Without Genes So much of the earlier gender differences in behavior may be interpreted as the consequence of practical differences in how men and women live in … With all due respect, there is not an evolutionist on the planet who has been able to come up with an adequate (much less believable) explanation as to how somatic cells reproduce by mitosis (thereby maintaining the species’ standard chromosome number in each cell), while gametes are produced by meiosis—wherein that chromosome number is halved so that, at the union of the male and female gametes during reproduction, the standard number is reinstated. 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