Robert Karl Stonjek writes:

>Quoting from "Genome" by Matt Ridley:
>"Rice did an ingenious experiment to test his idea.  For twenty-nine
>generations, he prevented female flies from evolving resistance [to male
>semen]: he kept a separate strain of females in which no evolutionary
>change occurred.  Meanwhile, he allowed males to generate more and more
>effective seminal fluid proteins by testing them against more and more
>resistant females.  After twenty-nine generations he brought the two
>lines together again.  The result was a walkover.  Male sperm was now so
>effective at manipulating female behaviour that it was effectively
>toxic: it could kill the females."

There is a substantial bit of faulty logic in Ridley's text, although he is by
no means the only one to promulgate it. Whenever two components of any sort of
design -- if they are specified independently of one another -- are allowed to
evolve on their own, without constant compatibility checks, the result is
likely to be "toxic" to one component or the other.

Imagine something far more prosaic that sex genes. Imagine for example the
isolated and independent evolution of the drive shafts and differentials in
your cars. If they were allowed to evolve in such a manner, even if only by
random drift, the eventual result will be a system that no longer properly
mates would will almost certainly prove to be destructive to the entire
mechanism when engaged at high speed..

What Rice is reporting is not a "war of the sexes" but a common
phenomenon well
known to every large engineering team. Systems either evolve as a unit whole,
or they're not a "system."

Wirt Atmar
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