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> There are biological reasons for this, since males are more disposable than females for reproduction. Think of one rooster for a dozen hens - this is still a
by SamReidHughes 5y ago
> There are biological reasons for this, since males are more disposable than females for reproduction. Think of one rooster for a dozen hens - this is still a viable flock, even if the other roosters get eaten.
Note that birds do not have mammalian sex chromosomes - males have ZZ and females have ZW - and females have been measured to have greater variability in birds.
So there is not really a biological reason as you say -- it just happened to go one way or the other in the past, and now different trees of species are stuck that way.
- james-bcn 5y agoI've not come across this before ("males have ZZ and females have ZW - and females have been measured to have greater variability in birds"). Do you have some references/books you can recommend? I'd like to find out more.
- SamReidHughes 5y agoFor example there is this paper on repeated differences in variance for different sexes in different groupings: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12224 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12224
- ponow 5y agoIf we can repeatedly find differences in variance despite similarity of mean for different sexes within a species or other groupings, then that would be a kind of thing that would be reported in biology research.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]