Dave Hone: prediction

Transcript context

…So diversity pays off more there. So diversity can pay off. We, we think that’s probably a major part of the reason that sex evolved in the first place, is it gives you resistance to changing environment and it gives you resistance to parasites and diseases which often reproduce way faster than you do. You know, bacteria can divide in a few hours. We reproduce every 20 years. That’s quite a difference. If we were all asexual clones and you’re vulnerable to some disease, you’re probably gonna get wiped out. Look at the, you know, Irish potato famine or something like that. So different may be appealing simply because it is different. It’s giving you variation. And there’s at least some evidence for that. There’s swordtails. So anyone who keeps little fish, if anyone’s a tropical fish keeper, swordtails are really quite common little tropical fish that you can get in all kinds of aquarium shops, and they’re a very boring fish shape, but the lower lobe of their tail has a big spike on it, and that’s the name. And they’re really close relatives of a group called the mollies which basically don’t have that. And in the wild, these, these are Amazonian fish, they don’t usually encounter each other, but even if you go and get not even the domesticated form ’cause these things have been bred for, you know, decades at this point, you can go and get some wild mollies and give them a wild male swordtail and they think he’s so much better than all the male mollies. They will go for that one and they will preferentially mate with that one. We don’t know the exact mechanism, but it appears to be, he looks similar enough that I recognize it as a potential mate, but different enough that this is exciting. And then this is where the sexy sons kick in because the females are now assuming those animals are successful and they can hybridize, or maybe it’s just a male who just happens to be a little bit blue or a little bit red or whatever it may be. Well, the female offspring, the daughters, are probably going to inherit mother’s preference, “I really like red,” and the males are probably gonna have red in them because their dad had more red. So guess what the next generation does? There’s more red and the females like more red, and you don’t have to come back much further and suddenly all the males are bright red. And that’s closer to beauty than I think almost anything else would be with still a naturalistic explanation. We kind of started talking about beauty from how much social life-…

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