Anon05/15/26, 16:12No.16976591
Meiosis and syngamy are extremely complex and likely evolved only once, probably in the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor (LECA) 1.5–2 billion years ago. Animals, plants, fungi, and protists all use variations of this same toolkit.Early sexual organisms were likely isogametic, but over time, evolution created a kind of optimization game: some cells benefited from becoming tiny and mobile so they could be produced in huge numbers, while others benefited from becoming larger and nutrient-rich to improve offspring survival. Because this tradeoff is so fundamental quantity versus investment I think different lineages likely converged on similar systems independently. In other words, sex itself may have one deep origin, but male/female specialization is probably an evolutionary solution rediscovered over and over again.Given my bias that anisogamy (male/female) is an optimization game of resource distribution (numbers vs. investment), I would bet that complex, multicellular alien life would also convergently evolve something analogous to male and female.
If alien life is complex, it will face the same trade-off - do you make many cheap, mobile gametes, or a few large, resource-rich ones? The stable solution seems to always be both. They might have three sexes (e.g., a "large resource" sex, a "small mobile" sex, and a "medium" transport sex), or fluid hermaphroditism, but the basic economic principle of anisogamy should hold up. Life that stays simple or lives in extremely resource-abundant environments might stay isogametic, tho