4 ms·
> what makes a "sex" a "sex" if it's just variability within the sex chromosome, but every individual is able to create progeny with 25% of other individuals?
by mac01021 9y ago
> what makes a "sex" a "sex" if it's just variability within the sex chromosome, but every individual is able to create progeny with 25% of other individuals?
I haven't read the article yet (looks like it's been DOSed by traffic from Hacker News?), but your criterion would be met in a population of 201 entities (numbered from 0 to 200) where each entity X can procreate with entities in the range [X-25 ... x+25] (mod 201, of course). That would arguably yield 201 distinct sexes, where each individual is sexually compatible with 25% of the population.
- olympus 9y agoIf a mapping between compatible sexes existed such as in your example, it would be more useful to think of sex as continuous spectrum rather than a discrete collection.
- mac01021 9y agoPerhaps. But only because the mapping I've defined has so much symmetry. Instead of the range [X-25 ... X+25], assign to each sex a random one of the 200-choose-50 (4.6 * 10^47) possible groups of partners sexes with size 50. It would be impossible to completely describe the set of sexual compatibilities without simply enumerating them, and therefore necessary to treat the sexes as a set of discrete entities.
- olympus 9y agoThat's why I wrote "such as in your example." I think that if each individual was randomly compatible with some subset of the population, we don't have 200 sexes, we have one sex and a 25% fertility rate.