Is sexual reproduction an example of convergent evolution?

[Jon Richfield]

When Jon and I talk about the future of molecular biology, in part, what you're talking about is just that.

Right!

 

[Jon Richfield]

And in the general context of my question, viruses are out of scope.

I cannot remember whether I have said this explicitly elsewhere, so forgive if I am getting repetitious, but certain viruses, the flu virus in particular, are in my opinion of enormous interest in the comparative study of mechanisms and evolutionary origins.
Just a reminder: the capsid of the flu virus is not of a particularly well defined shape or size. It ranges from a roughly spherical blob to a long tube. More to the point the genome is split, roughly gene by gene, into separate segments roughly analogous to chromosomes. These segments get packed apparently haphazardly into the capsids, so that as a rule one must be infected by a large number of capsids if one is to develop flu.
If the same cell is infected by different strains of flu, one gets incidental recombination, so that a totally new strain (or even several new strains) may emerge.
Note that this apparently inelegant mechanism not only is extremely, even dramatically, effective in nature, but on the one hand is far simpler than meiosis, therefore entailing a correspondingly smaller selective burden, and on the other it combines the functions of reduction and division.
The fact that we have such a radically different mechanism giving such nearly analogous functions illustrates how carefully we should consider the possibility that there might be unobvious alternatives to mechanisms that we otherwise might have considered as fundamental.
Items such as this have made me very pleased to have stumbled across a book of virology years ago. I had always regarded the field as uninspiring, but I found the book full of breathtaking examples, often with implications far beyond virology.
Cheers,
Jon