As much as I don't believe in
creationism, my faith in
evolution has been shaken since I started asking about the evolution of
meiosis. As far as I can
fathom it could not have happened. I can go along with
Gaia controling the temperature of the
Earth, molecules hazardly coming together to form the first life, and that life evolving into the
asexual creatures we know today, but this doesn't help me understand where I, a (potentially) sexually reproductive creature, came from.
The thing with evolution is that all grand
transformations must happen with many
increments, as in this explanation (click the link) of the
eye because of small changes in
dna due to
radiation, novel patterns happening due to sexual reproduction (after the development of meiosis), or other imperfections in the reproductive process. With meiosis there aren't enough small steps to fill the gaps.
I've heard theories that this started as well by chance, single celled organisms bumping into each other randomly (or due to cannibalism according to one theory) forming new daughter cells, the process became more sophisticated and developed into sexual reproduction. Unforturnately, nowhere in this model is there an explanation of the first sperm or ovum. Assuming this process could in fact create new organisms, these new organisms would not be more prone to dividing into cells with only half the chromosomes.
Another theory, this one may be original, would have primative sexes develop as an intermediate step by simple random radiation. Without sex to bind them together they could simply continue to evolve divergently. For the sake of theory, even create a hypothetical symbiosis that keeps them in the same ecological community.
Or perhaps the sex cells were self-sufficient, that is that they could live on their own for long periods of time while looking for another sex cell to unite with. This way space and time become less of a problem, and the cell could even search for an ideal environment for the union rather than the parent organism being responsible for creating it, thus sidestepping the whole sophisticated reproductive organ debate.
Another of my potentially orginal theories suggests that sexual reproduction in its primative beginings occured in hermaphrodites. But it would take further theorizing to get from
mitosis to here, and from here to modern dual sex system.
Essentially, the problem lies in the physical act of creating a sex cell, ie how did the first primitive sperm evolve?
This is the question I want
religious nuts to start asking, to make the egghead work harder for a solution. Why, because I want answers (even if it means giving the creationists a leg up).