Writing about science carries the risk of embarrassment. If you champion a theory and it gets disproved, you have some explaining to do. So it is nice when a theory you choose does win the race.
In the early 1990s I wrote a book called "The Red Queen," which, among other things, came out strongly in favor of a particular explanation for why sex exists. The Red Queen theory—named after Lewis Carroll's monarch, who lives in a weird world "where it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place"—holds that most creatures reproduce through sex rather than by cloning in order to keep a step ahead of threatening parasites.
Although a cloning population can have twice as many babies as a sexual population, it becomes a sitting duck for parasites, which hone their genes to evade the immune system of the clone. A sexual population, by contrast, remixes its genes every generation, in effect changing the locks on its cells in order to outwit the parasites.
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