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Neanderthal Sex Boosted Immunity In Modern Humans
NotSanguine writes "Sexual relations between ancient humans and their evolutionary cousins were critical for our modern immune systems, researchers report (paper itself is subscription only) in the journal Science. Mating with Neanderthals and another ancient group called Denisovans introduced genes that help us cope with viruses to this day, they conclude."
I'm sure this knowledge was a big influence on who Mrs. Ballmer chose as a mate.
Trolling is a art,
Apparently, one of the major upsides of sex(from a darwinian, rather than purely recreational, perspective) of the not-intuitively-all-that-sensible arrangement of having to seek out a conspecific, risk sexually transmitted infection, and mate simply in order to reproduce, is the rapid genetic diversification you can achieve by recombining genomes with others. Your asexual organisms have it much easier; but they have to depend on mutation(or, as with some bacteria, quasi-sex genetic exchange mechanisms).
The neat organisms, in my opinion, are the edge cases that can go either way. this piece(sorry about the paywall...) examines snails that can either reproduce sexually or spawn clones asexually. As it turns out, in areas with higher parasite loads, the snails resort to sex at much higher rates in order to keep abreast of the parasite threat, while the less pressured snails go for the rapid and low-risk strategy of asexual cloning.
Your entire comment reeks of idiocy. You begin your tirade by implying that DNA is invalid because it happens to have been extracted from a tooth belonging to a subspecies to which we have assigned a name you feel is funny. You then begin a series of rhetorical questions that, in the order you ask them, express disdain for the government, a misunderstanding of what constitutes proof, lay out a false analogy between "rampant wild sex" within a population and interbreeding of moderately divergent populations in nature, and an implication that, because you lack the background and/or intelligence to understand how researchers arrived at their conclusions, the scientific community operates on authority instead of on evidence. Typically when I see that argument it's a form of projection, usually from a religious background. You finish your useless rant by completely ignoring that various avenues of research are being carried on concurrently, that evolutionary insights are absolutely central to HIV and AIDS research, and then throwing in an appeal to pity not really aimed at anyone in particular. The final syllable of your comment is "ha", by which you mean to imply that anyone who takes you seriously would consider your point established. Go back to conservapedia, creationist.