Come Fly, and Leave the Baggage Behind

Abstract
One question that evolutionary biologists love to ponder is why sex evolved. As Lenski explains in his provocative Perspective, there are many theories to explain the evolution of sexual recombination. Elegant experiments in the fruit fly now lend weight to one hypothesis, which proposes that sexual recombination frees beneficial mutations from the excess baggage of deleterious mutations (Rice and Chippindale).