Ed Ricemeyer
speaker
141 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Ed Ricemeyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's not bad.
But what this does is, by happening a bunch of times over these many generations in random places, then this gives natural selection something to work with that it didn't have to work with before.
Without gene conversion, natural selection only has the diversity created by mutations to work with.
And so it can either just reject an entire lineage because the mutational load is bad or something, or it can promote an entire lineage, but it can't act on individual pieces of the genome the way that it can with sexual reproduction.
But what gene conversion is doing is it's giving it different options to choose from.
In essence, this is a way of...
When it does this gene conversion and it happens to overwrite a mutation that is deleterious to the organism, then natural selection can take advantage of that and say, hey, this is good.
It has gotten rid of a mutation that is bad for it.
And so this one is the one that's going to get selected.
So that's a great question.
And I'm not sure that...
There really is a good answer to that yet.
But what seems to have happened is that the reason that they still need the sperm despite not reproducing sexually appears to be that something about their sexual reproduction was broken a little bit.
And it wasn't broken so much that it made them completely incapable of reproducing.
And it wasn't so broken that it turned them into a clonal organism that could just, without any sperm or anything, reproduce.
So it's more like it messed up this one little piece, but everything else is in place.
And so it still needs sperm, something about what the sperm fertilizing the egg signals to the egg allows it to keep growing.
Just an accident.
No decision to it.
Just like almost everything in evolution is just an accident that has happened to work out over the long term.
Showing 101–120 of 141 · page 6 of 8
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