Dumb Science. "Scientists discover why we need men."

Hello readers. All twelve of you.

And here's today's Dumbness Report.

The ABC and some papers today carry a story from The Times (once a great paper) that "scientists have finally discovered why we have sex."  What they mean of course is why we have sexual reproduction. Of course the simple answer is because it's much more fun but they're talking about it from an evolutionary point of view.

The story contains some interesting narrative teasers such as "Why do we have men?" (clearly to draw in the female readers) and "Sex and gender have long been an evolutionary mystery." and "Superficially, asexual reproduction, in which cloned daughters are sent into the world instead, would seem far more sensible."  It then goes on to talk about how an experiment with beetles showed that populations where females had a choice of mates developed fewer mutations. Wow. How about that.

The problem is of course is that we have understood the reasons for sexual reproduction for over a hundred years. The statements that "gender (has) long been an "evolutionary mystery" and asexual reproduction would "seem far more sensible." are simply not true. In fact they're idiotic. Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have known that sexual reproduction, where the genes of parents were mixed to create variation amongst offspring was a driver of evolution. In fact it can be argued that sexual reproduction was evolution's greatest invention.

Waiting for beneficial mutations - i,e genetic errors - to occur in cloned organisms takes a long time, which is which why evolution in the pre-sexual reproduction era on Earth took about a billion years. The emergence of sexual reproduction led to a rapid increase in diversity and probable contributed to life on Earth surviving some of the severe changes of the pre-Cambrian era. The first advantage of the sexual mixing of genes was that it led to variations that were mostly non-fatal (unlike error mutations that were mostly harmful). Somatic variation meant that, if environmental conditions changed, there was a probability that some of the off-spring would survive whereas, if they were genetically identical (clones), they could all perish. Also, the variations were reversible: if conditions changed back again, there was always the possibility evolving back towards a previous genome. Last of all, the role of sexual selection in constantly improving the genome by organisms choosing "the best mate" has long been understood.

We seem to get a constant stream of these kinds of scientific "announcements" in the media. Almost once a week some discovery is trumpeted where we think 'Didn't we already know that?' Often they are completely stupid in the "Scientist's prove hitting people with sticks causes pain" type of way. Others are just rehashes of all studies. What they all have in common is that there is something in their subject matter or title which the media feels it can link to current controversies or political issues. This one for example, was promulgated because the press managed to twist a fairly prosaic study about mutation reduction in beetles into a "Scientists discover why we need men." headline which seems to contribute to some sort feminist discourse.

Dumbness Rating:  8 out of 10. (where higher is dumber.)