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I’m puzzled by your interpretation: One of the first things the article does is acknowledge the usefulness of sexual dimorphism, and backs it up with references

by klmr 8y ago

I’m puzzled by your interpretation: One of the first things the article does is acknowledge the usefulness of sexual dimorphism, and backs it up with references to research. I agree with you that the research on ostracods is unlikely to generalise beyond some strict conditions. And the article itself says: > But it’s not sexual dimorphism itself that’s the problem – it’s the type of sexual dimorphism […:] males that invested more resources in reproduction did so at significant evolutionary cost The article then jumps to evolutionary specialisation, and it’s been known for some time that this (regardless of sexual dimorphism) likely decreases adaptability. At any rate, you seem to want to read “masculinity bashing” into the article. But this is of course not the subject of the article, and never even implied.

posterboy 8y ago
Specialization and adaptibality are two sides of the same coin. What is adaptibility if not the ability to specialize on occasion. And, while individual specialized species might run into a local mininum that their specialization does not get them out of, mamals and chordata in general are highly diverse...
- klmr 8y ago
  > [mammals] and chordata in general are highly diverse Yes but we’re speaking of adaptability on the level of species. And the more specialised a species is to an environment, the higher its investment (in terms of some vague “evolvability resource”, which we might naïvely equate with number of mutations) in one particular strategy. This pays off as long as the ecological niche exists. Changes to that niche may require (relatively) fast adaptive changes, and these are in principle easier for generalists than for specialists. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, of course, but it seems to be a robust general principle. It’s therefore not correct to say that > Specialization and [adaptability] are two sides of the same coin Adaptability describes the ability of a species to adapt to new conditions; specialisation describes the state after adaptation has happened. Roughly, a highly adaptable species is a generalist whereas a highly specialised species is, well, a specialist: in this sense, the terms are (at least to some extent) opposites.

by klmr 8y ago

posterboy 8y ago

Specialization and adaptibality are two sides of the same coin. What is adaptibility if not the ability to specialize on occasion. And, while individual specialized species might run into a local mininum that their specialization does not get them out of, mamals and chordata in general are highly diverse...

klmr 8y ago
> [mammals] and chordata in general are highly diverse Yes but we’re speaking of adaptability on the level of species. And the more specialised a species is to an environment, the higher its investment (in terms of some vague “evolvability resource”, which we might naïvely equate with number of mutations) in one particular strategy. This pays off as long as the ecological niche exists. Changes to that niche may require (relatively) fast adaptive changes, and these are in principle easier for generalists than for specialists. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, of course, but it seems to be a robust general principle. It’s therefore not correct to say that > Specialization and [adaptability] are two sides of the same coin Adaptability describes the ability of a species to adapt to new conditions; specialisation describes the state after adaptation has happened. Roughly, a highly adaptable species is a generalist whereas a highly specialised species is, well, a specialist: in this sense, the terms are (at least to some extent) opposites.