Natural selection and the advantage of recombination
Résumé
The ubiquity of sex and recombination in nature is widely viewed as enigmatic, despite an abundance of limited-scope explanations. Natural selection, it seems, should amplify well-matched combinations of genes. Recombination would break up these well-matched combinations and should thus be suppressed. We show, to the contrary, that natural selection amplifies poorly-matched gene combinations and creates negative associations in the process. Recombination breaks up these poorly-matched combinations, neutralizes the negative associations, and should thus be passively and universally favored.