🚀 go-pugleaf

> julia@slovax.UUCP (Julia Haviland)
>> Wrong.  Flat wrong.  *NO* new genotypes are created by sexual
>> reproduction, cross breeding or not.
> Wayne seems to be confusing genotype with gene.  A gene is loosely
> defined as the unit which produces some observable trait, behavior, or
> biochemical event.  Genotype is the collection of all genes a
> particular organism has. [...]  Sexual reproduction is random
> only in that which allele, of the two alleles of a gene an individual
> can have, goes to a particular gamete and which gametes unite to form
> offspring is random.

Silly, sloppy me.  Julia is completely correct.

However, please don't let my blunder (and my subsequent overly smug
assertion of Jan Wasilewsky's "ignorance" of biology) blunt the two main
points I was trying to make.  These are still valid.

First, no new genetic material is created by sexual reproduction.  New
genotypes do not new genes make.

Second, the selection of genetic material from parents to form offspring
is random (within rules, as mentioned by Julia above).  The analogy that
Jan Wasilewsky raised (likening sexual reproduction to creating a new
book from words chosen from a dictionary) is misleading, and a better
analogy is the pairwise random selection of short stories from two (very
long) anthologies to form a new anthology.

--
Moon calls them Fortran Machines and Lisp Machines,
but I would prefer to call them fuzzy mammals and
pterodactyls myself.
                                --- Richard P. Gabriel
-- 
Wayne Throop      <the-known-world>!mcnc!rti-sel!dg_rtp!throopw