The evolutionary advantage of diploid sex

TL;DR

This study uses a modified Penna Model to compare diploid and triploid organisms, finding that diploid sex has no evolutionary disadvantage compared to triploid, and traditional two-individual sex is superior to three-individual sex.

Contribution

The paper introduces a modified Penna Model to evaluate the evolutionary advantage of diploid versus triploid organisms, demonstrating the superiority of diploid sex.

Findings

Triploid organisms do not have an evolutionary advantage over diploid organisms.

Usual two-individual sex outperforms three-individual sex.

Diploid sex remains evolutionarily favored in the model.

Abstract

We modify the Penna Model for biological aging, which is based on the mutation-accumulation theory, in order to verify if there would be any evolutionary advantage of triploid over diploid organisms. We show that this is not the case, and that usual sex is always better than that involving three individuals.