ICMCS seminar - Is there sex on other planets?

Title: Is there sex on other planets? 

Abstract:  Sex is quite literally *everywhere* on our planet, spanning the tree of life from RNA viruses to blue whales.  If an alien system of self-replicating entities were discovered, should we expect sex to be a feature of this system? Put differently, is there something about life that inherently requires sex? This question continues to be considered one of science's biggest open questions and has been called the "queen of problems" in evolutionary biology. Established theory on the evolution of sex consists of a patchwork of numerous limited-scope special cases that makes divergent predictions and leaves you feeling confused. I find that Fisher's partitioning of variance in evolution (implicit in his "fundamental theorem") provides a retrospectively obvious and biologically-meaningful renormalization group that allows you to zoom out to macro-evolutionary scales. As you zoom out, the dizzying complexity is left behind, confusion subsides, and a new clarity at scale reveals sex to be an *emergent* property of evolution. Evolutionary pressure for the emergence is scale-free and belongs to a standard universality class. So yes, there is sex on other planets ;-)

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