the Greater Nomadic Council

On the X Chromosome

I promise not to link to every Pharyngula post, but this one's just too good to pass up, largely because of this paragraph:

Recombination is a kind of repair mechanism; not a clever one, but one that can have long term effects. Imagine a very stupid mechanic who maintains two cars by constantly swapping pieces from one to another. If one has a broken carburetor, at least one car will function. If one has a broken carburetor and the other has a broken alternator, every once in a while in his manic swapping, one of the cars will end up with both functioning components, and the other both broken ones: that means there will be at least one car he can send off the lot. Note that this is not a viable business model for a human garage, but it works well enough in a ruthless sort of way for biology. While it produces junk cars as well as good ones, most of the junkers blow up as they're leaving the lot, so no one survives to complain, and all anyone sees actually traveling down the road are the lucky products of random exchanges, and it's only those lucky drivers who go on to make more cars.

There's a lot more information in the post than just that, but what a wonderfully clear way of explaining recombination. Before I read the post, I had only a vague idea of what it was; now I have a basic understanding not only of the mechanism, but one of the purposes of recombination as well. Plus, it's just a great image.