ABSTRACT
It has often been said that sexual reproduction is advantageous because of the enormous number of genotypes that can be produced by a recombination of a relatively small number of genes. The number of potential combinations is indeed great, but the number produced in any single generation is limited by the population size, and gene combinations are broken up by recombination just as effectively as they are produced by it. Furthermore, for a given amount of variability, the efficiency of selection is greater in an asexual population than in one with free recombination since the rate is measured by the total genotypic variance rather than by just the additive component thereof.
