As Discussed in The Earlier Part of This Article

As discussed in the earlier part of this article, sexual reproduction is conventionally explained as an
adaptation for producing genetic variation through allelic recombination. As acknowledged above,
however, serious problems with this explanation have led many biologists to conclude that the
benefit of sex is a major unsolved problem in evolutionary biology.
An alternative "informational" approach to this problem has led to the view that the two fundamental
aspects of sex, genetic recombination and outcrossing, are adaptive responses to the two major
sources of "noise" in transmitting genetic information. Genetic noise can occur as either physical
damage to the genome (e.g. chemically altered bases of DNA or breaks in the chromosome) or
replication errors (mutations).[31][32][33] This alternative view is referred to as the repair and
complementation hypothesis, to distinguish it from the traditional variation hypothesis.
The repair and complementation hypothesis assumes that genetic recombination is fundamentally a
DNA repair process, and that when it occurs during meiosis it is an adaptation for repairing the
genomic DNA which is passed on to progeny. Recombinational repair is the only repair process
known which can accurately remove double-strand damages in DNA, and such damages are both
common in nature and ordinarily lethal if not repaired. For instance, double-strand breaks in DNA
occur about 50 times per cell cycle in human cells (see naturally occurring DNA damage).
Recombinational repair is prevalent from the simplest viruses to the most complex multicellular
eukaryotes. It is effective against many different types of genomic damage, and in particular is highly
efficient at overcoming double-strand damages. Studies of the mechanism of meiotic recombination
indicate that meiosis is an adaptation for repairing DNA.[34] These considerations form the basis for
the first part of the repair and complementation hypothesis.
In some lines of descent from the earliest organisms, the diploid stage of the sexual cycle, which
was at first transient, became the predominant stage, because it allowed complementation — the
masking of deleterious recessive mutations (i.e. hybrid vigor or heterosis). Outcrossing, the second
fundamental aspect of sex, is maintained by the advantage of masking mutations and the
disadvantage of inbreeding (mating with a close relative) which allows expression of recessive
mutations (commonly observed as inbreeding depression). This is in accord with Charles Darwin,
[35]
who concluded that the adaptive advantage of sex is hybrid vigor; or as he put it, "the offspring of
two individuals, especially if their progenitors have been subjected to very different conditions, have
a great advantage in height, weight, constitutional vigor and fertility over the self fertilised offspring
from either one of the same parents."
However, outcrossing may be abandoned in favor of parthenogenesis or selfing (which retain the
advantage of meiotic recombinational repair) under conditions in which the costs of mating are very
high. For instance, costs of mating are high when individuals are rare in a geographic area, such as
when there has been a forest fire and the individuals entering the burned area are the initial ones to
arrive. At such times mates are hard to find, and this favors parthenogenic species.
In the view of the repair and complementation hypothesis, the removal of DNA damage by
recombinational repair produces a new, less deleterious form of informational noise, allelic
recombination, as a by-product. This lesser informational noise generates genetic variation, viewed
by some as the major effect of sex, as discussed in the earlier parts of this article.
Deleterious mutation clearance[edit]

Mutations can have many different effects upon an organism. It is generally believed that the
majority of non-neutral mutations are deleterious, which means that they will cause a decrease in the
organism's overall fitness.[36][page range too broad] If a mutation has a deleterious effect, it will then usually be
removed from the population by the process of natural selection. Sexual reproduction is believed to
be more efficient than asexual reproduction in removing those mutations from the genome. [37]
There are two main hypotheses which explain how sex may act to remove deleterious genes from
the genome.
Evading harmful mutation build-up[edit]

Main article: Muller's ratchet
While DNA is able to recombine to modify alleles, DNA is also susceptible to mutations within the
sequence that can affect an organism in a negative manner. Asexual organisms do not have the
ability to recombine their genetic information to form new and differing alleles. Once
a mutation occurs in the DNA or other genetic carrying sequence, there is no way for the mutation to
be removed from the population until another mutation occurs that ultimately deletes the primary
mutation. This is rare among organisms.
Hermann Joseph Muller introduced the idea that mutations build up in asexual reproducing
organisms. Muller described this occurrence by comparing the mutations that accumulate as
a ratchet. Each mutation that arises in asexually reproducing organisms turns the ratchet once. The
ratchet is unable to be rotated backwards, only forwards. The next mutation that occurs turns the
ratchet once more. Additional mutations in a population continually turn the ratchet and the
mutations, mostly deleterious, continually accumulate without recombination. [38] These mutations are
passed onto the next generation because the offspring are exact genetic clones of their parents. The
genetic load of organisms and their populations will increase due to the addition of multiple
deleterious mutations and decrease the overall reproductive success and fitness.
For sexually reproducing populations, studies have shown that single-celled bottlenecks are
beneficial for resisting mutation build-up[citation needed]. Passaging a population through a single-celled
bottleneck involves the fertilization event occurring with haploid sets of DNA, forming one fertilized
cell. For example, humans undergo a single-celled bottleneck in that the haploid sperm fertilizes the
haploid egg, forming the diploid zygote, which is unicellular. This passage through a single cell is
beneficial in that it lowers the chance of mutations from being passed on through multiple
individuals. Instead, the mutation is only passed onto one individual. [39] Further studies
using Dictyostelium discoideum suggest that this unicellular initial stage is important for resisting
mutations due to the importance of high relatedness. Highly related individuals are more closely
related, and more clonal, whereas less related individuals are less so, increasing the likelihood that
an individual in a population of low relatedness may have a detrimental mutation. Highly related
populations also tend to thrive better than lowly related because the cost of sacrificing an individual
is greatly offset by the benefit gained by its relatives and in turn, its genes, according to kin selection.
The studies with D. discoideum showed that conditions of high relatedness resisted mutant
individuals more effectively than those of low relatedness, suggesting the importance of high
relatedness to resist mutations from proliferating.[40]
Removal of deleterious genes

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As discussed in the earlier part of this article, sexual reproduction is conventionally explained as an

Deleterious mutation clearance[edit]

Evading harmful mutation build-up[edit]

Removal of deleterious genes

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