Structured populations and the maintenance of sex

Abstract

The maintenance of sexual populations has been an ongoing issue for evolutionary biologists, largely due to the two-fold cost of sexual versus asexual reproduction. Many explanations have been proposed to explain the benefits of sex, including the role of recombination in maintaining diversity and the elimination of detrimental mutations, the advantage of sex in rapidly changing environments, and the role of spatial structure, finite population size and drift. Many computational models have been developed to explore theories relating to sexual populations; this paper examines the role of spatial structure in supporting sexual populations, based on work originally published in 2006 [1]. We highlight flaws in the original model and develop a simpler, more plausible model that demonstrates the role of mutation, local competition and dispersal in maintaining sexual populations. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.