Speaker: Motty Perry, Don Patinkin Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and University of Warwick

Title: Why Sex and Why Only in Pairs?

Date: 7 PM, 30th December, 2010

Venue: Conference Room, India International Center

Chair of Lecture: Kaushik Basu, Chief Economic Advisor, Govt. of India and Professor of Economics and C. Marks Professor at the Cornell University


Abstract
Understanding the purpose of sex remains one of the most important unresolved problems in evolutionary biology. One of the reasons for its unresolved status is that many competing theories have proven difficult to reject. In the spirit of Fisher (1930), we propose that a theory of sex must be capable of predicting that sexually produced offspring have only two parents, not three or more. As an example of the power of this approach, it is shown that the mutational deterministic (MD) hypothesis fails this test. That is, the MD hypothesis implicitly predicts that triparental sex dominates biparental sex, so the latter should not be observed, contrary to fact.

Get the flyer here: Download.