Comment by Retric
2 days ago
> Which specific characteristics? How are those "favorable"? How are "injurious" filtered out?
Mobility for one, within close distance to an egg the sperm which can orient on the chemical gradient beat out those unable to move.
> So why not billions?
Cost vs benefit
> Now try it with the eggs. Why have a few instead of millions?
Spending more resources on a few fetuses is the chosen strategy. Which would run into issues if both sides released millions of cells. The chemical signaling to abort a large number would be complex at implantation, much simpler to release a limited number of eggs.
> Cost vs benefit
Both of which you've failed to quantify, so you have no answer as to why stop at millions and not thousands or billions.
> Mobility for one
Your continue to stop at the most important part - relevance to your own criteria. If you care about probability of live birth or cutting out those unnamed "issues", how do tiny variations in mobility help? What's the mechanism connecting the two?
> Both of which you've failed to quantify, so you have no answer as to why stop at millions and not thousands or billions.
I already quantified it relative to the metabolic cost on an organism the size of a human. There’s a big difference to us between 10 calories (more specifically 5 to 25 calories) and 10,000 there’s not a big difference between 10 calories and 0.01. Thus we spend a relatively but not actually trivial amount of resources for minor benefit.
A fruit fly by necessity operates at a different scale. It would help if you read my posts here.
> How do tiny variations in mobility help.
Mobility is a complex test of a wide range of cellular machinery. Which means that cellular machinery works well.
Lifespan is similarly a great test for the ability to maintain cellular homeostasis.
> I already quantified it relative to the metabolic cost on an organism the size of a human
You haven't, there isn't a single number in that reference. Even now you can't, you completely avoided quantifying the benefit and created a strawman for the costs.
> There’s a big difference to us between 10 calories and 10,000
What about the small difference between 10 and 200? That would move you from 50 mil to 1 bil. What does your "cost/benefit" formula say?
> It would help if you read my posts here.
The opposite - because I did and saw you unable to justify the results even after you tried to expand the original point several times. What would help instead if you tried to focus on a coherent argument instead of making up false claims about the other person.
> Mobility is a complex test of a wide range of cellular machinery. Which means that cellular machinery works well.
So again you have nothing specific to say, what you actually need to prove is that probability of live birth is part of that causal "wide range" of complexity. It could very well be that high mobility comes at the expense of that probability.
Analogy: you can make a car more mobile at the expense of driver safety/comfort while the same generic "mobility complex test wide range engineering machinery" would be true.
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