Science Update- Promiscuous females and why they are useful

Hi. Welcome to Weirdbeautiful- the blog devoted to the strange appeal of the natural world.
Today's oddity is this story about why promiscuity in females prevents a population going extinct-

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20100225/thl-promiscuous-females-help-species-d831572.html

When I was studying (micro)biology at UCL, we had what seemed to be endless genetics lectures in the second and third years on population genetics- the kind of things that Richard Dawkins and a thousand other, less well known, scientists get really excited about. There is the idea that parts of an organism's genetic code can be "at war" as it were with other parts- reproducing wildly and spreading, a bit like a computer virus, at the expense of other parts of the genome, the animal and the population of animals in general. We had to use obscure formulae to calculate what would happen under different circumstances. It was all very dry, but also very interesting. I personally think that, whatever faults Ricahrd Dawkins may or may not have, one of his great strengths is that he writes on this interesting subject (theoretical biology and genetics) in an approachable and catchy way: something that is much more difficult than it sounds.

Of course, Richard Dawkins is not the only person in this field- the article above is another great example. Essentially, it relates some new research by Prof Nina Wedell and her colleagues on just such a parasitic or selfish part of the genome: a "sex-ratio distortion (SR) chromosome" and how promiscuous females produce off spring that are free from it.