Re: Why Sex ?

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
19 Dec 1997 08:40:44 +0100


Philos Anthropy <anthropy@inwave.com> writes:

> > Is conjugation that rare? I was on a lecture about how plasmids evolve
> > (they are selfish replicators, after all, and do their best to
> > maximize their fitness) and I got the impression they are sometimes
> > almost littering the cellular environment.
>
> It may be more common than was portrayed in my Biochemistry book and
> indicated by the professors I've had but it is biological "standard wisdom"
> at least that bacteria usually reproduce asexually by mitotic division.

Yes, nobody denies that. But I got the impression that plasmid
exchanges are fairly common (at least so common that a beneficial gene
such as antibiotics resistance can spread quite quickly through the
population if needed).

-- 
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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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