Well, it’s getting close to Valentine’s Day, so it’s a good time to talk about sex. There was an article today on the NY Times web site about some ants that grow mushrooms in their underground nests. Not very sexy, I’ll admit. But the article had a sidenote about the biological origins of sexual reproduction and the evolutionary rationale behind it. It is an interesting question once you step back to ponder it: just why do organisms go to the trouble of mixing up their genes with another member of their species before growing a new version of themselves? Why not just cut to the chase and clone your own genes? That would take less energy (think of all the sweat and money we humans put into the rituals of courtship and mating), which could otherwise be devoted to survival purposes such as gathering more food and better shelter. What was or is the Darwinian point of sex? (Don’t say “happiness”; even if sex does lead to happiness, which is debatable in the long-run perspective, that happiness is a biologically necessary part of the process, an incentive to engage in a complex and otherwise unobvious behavior pattern).

It turns out that the overall point of sex is to beat out the parasites (AIDS being a modern day example relevant to our species). Once bigger and more complex creatures started forming along the evolutionary time scale, little critters like molds and bacteria started making a living by eating them up — that’s what parasites do. The bigger things developed defense mechanisms against the parasites, but the little buggers were able to shift their tactics faster than the big guys could (i.e., they could mutate more rapidly). Therefore, bigger things like flowers and reptiles and animals needed to catch up with the parasite’s ability to shift their genes around in response to environmental changes, and sexual reproduction turned out to be the magic bullet (you guys with the dirty minds, stop snickering). By creating babies with all sorts of genetic combinations, it was more likely that someone would always be able to survive the latest infection or infestation; thus the species that sexually reproduces has more insurance in the survival game.

How romantic.

And how ironic that our species is now developing a technique (cloning) to give away its survival insurance.

Before I go, let me mention a book review and author interview on the Atlantic Magazine web site regarding Nick Cook’s The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology. All I can say is, whoa! This is X-Files stuff. My first instinct is to dismiss it, but Atlantic isn’t a sensationalist, crackpot conspiracy-theory rag. I do recall reading somewhere about experiments regarding “gravity reduction” and the quantum energy in the “zero-point field”. But it makes you scratch your head, because gravity and quantum physics are like cats and dogs, their relationship is still one of the biggest mysteries to modern physics. So why does this guy think that Nazi scientists actually had some UFO-like things up in the air back in ’44 (the things that gave the rock group The Foo Fighters their name), and the US Government continues to work on the problem of making this esoteric (at best) area of physics into something useable and controllable (and, unfortunately, deadly)?

I guess that the truth is out there.