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Sexrepro (Real Life) questions

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Endy:
How come sperm don't asexually reproduce themselves. Wouldn't that make it more likely that their own individual traits would be passed along the line?

shvarz:
What do you mean, reproduce themselves?  Like sperms behaving like single-cell organisms?  The simplest answer to that would be "Because that's not how they are made", I guess.  Or do you mean something else?

Numsgil:
I think he's asking why sperm don't degenerate into single celled independant organisms.  Declare independance from the body so to speak.

I think the answer is that they rarely (really only cancer I think) reproduce themselves.  Instead, they are made from other cells.  Because of this, mutations are kept to a minimum (you're not copying a copy, you're making fresh copies all the time).

Elite:
Intrestingly, there is a gene in mice known as the t gene

Having two copies of the t gene causes death or permanent sterility, so having the gene should be selected against

However, the t gene distorts sperm production so that 90% of a heterozygous carrier's sperm will contain the t gene, instead of the usual 50%

The t gene 'cheats', and modifies sperm production to spread itself, and in doing so can wipe out whole populations of mice as the gene spreads through them and increases in frequency to the point where the mice can no longer have viable children

Testlund:
I've never even heard of sterile mice. Usually they breed too much. I used to breed mice some years ago where I had two races, one natural brown race and one that was white with black eyes (no albino). This was the popular species which you can buy at the pet store. I'm not sure what you call them in English, but we call them husmöss = housemice here in Sweden. It's the species that has adapted to live close to humans. At one time I lost control over it a little and they started to escape, but I managed to get them and stop it. Hehe.

I've been thinking about Endy's question.... Maybe we should ask why there are multicellular organisms at all? There were only very primitive bacteria on earth for a very long time and then fairly recently in earth's history it exploded in multicellular organisms spreading all over the world. But we should be glad that sperms haven't decided yet to live on their own without their host.  

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