Scientist and researcher Christos Papadimitriou, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California-Berkeley, has worked with researchers in the U.S. to identify an algorithm that governs the game genes play during sex. The algorithm helps explain how evolution has yielded the large diversity of life we see today (Dollarphotoclub).

155 years after Charles Darwin first published “on the Origin of Species”, the new algorithm sheds light on how sex allows genes to recombine into a new body, that, in conjunction with natural selection in the environment, creates an even greater variety of life.

Sex has always been a paradox as the mixing of genes through sexual recombination helps create a perfect individual, however the perfection gets lost in the next generation because with sex, the offspring only inherits half the perfect parent’s genes. If sexual recombination speeds up the rate at which good solutions are found, it also speeds up the rate at which those solutions are broken apart.

In this scenario, it becomes difficult to explain the role of sex when it comes to evolution, and to understand how natural selection leads to desirable genetic variations that persist over time.

The researchers involved in the study point out that slow and patient adjustments ultimately result in portfolios that perform almost as well as if one invested only in a few selected shares. The role of sex allows the prudent investor to “bet” on a wide range of genes (shares), according to Papadimitriou. He says that wherever this algorithm is remarkably effective and works wonders. That is why progress has been so successful.

The proposal, published Monday, in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, addresses the dueling evolutionary forces of survival of the fittest and of diversity.

* Christos Papadimitriou was born in Athens in 1949 and studied electrical engineering at the National Polytechnic of Athens, and then went on for a PhD in computer theory at Princeton University (1976). He has taught at Harvard, MIT and Stanford in the U.S., and is now a professor at the University of Berkeley. In Greece he is known among other things for his collaboration with Apostolos Doxiadis for the creation of international bestseller graphic novel “Logicomix” but he has also written the novel “Turing, Lessons of Love” (Livanis, 2003). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering of the USA, and has received numerous scientific awards, including the “Charles Babbage Award” and the “Katayanagi Award.”