dwise1 writes:
In an email exchange with a creationist, Bill Morgan, who tried to raise the "issue" of the evolution of sex, I worked through it based primarily on my high school biology class from circa 1967, which incidentally did not address that evolutionary subject. Basically, I pointed out that we find so many organisms with multiple methods of reproduction that it makes sense for those alternatives to sexual reproduction to have pre-existed and to have enabled those organisms to continue to procreate until the kinks in sexual reproduction got worked out -- that would be an answer to the standard creationst kvetch of "it had to work perfectly the first time".
All good points and approaches. Even our basic prokaryote friends participate in exchanges of DNA which can run the gamut from picking up naked exogenous DNA to more advanced sex pili. As you discussed later, there is a very diverse and messy spectrum of DNA exchange within and between species. It is hardly the black/white situation that creationists try to paint.
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