The rarer-sex effect
Abstract
The study of sex allocation—that is, the investment of resources into male versus female reproductive effort—yields among the best quantitative evidence for Darwinian adaptation, and has long enjoyed a tight and productive interplay of theoretical and empirical research. The fitness consequences of an individual’s sex allocation decisions depend crucially upon the sex allocation behaviour of others and, accordingly, sex allocation is readily conceptualised in terms of an evolutionary game. Here, I investigate the historical development of understanding of a fundamental driver of the evolution of sex allocation—the rarer-sex effect—from its inception in the writing of Charles Darwin in 1871 through to its explicit framing in terms of consanguinity and reproductive value by William D. Hamilton in 1972. I show that step-wise development of theory proceeded through refinements in the conceptualization of the strategy set, the payoff function and the unbeatable strategy.
Citation
Gardner , A 2023 , ' The rarer-sex effect ' , Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , vol. 378 , no. 1876 . https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0500
Publication
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0962-8436Type
Journal item
Rights
Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the originalauthor and source are credited.
Description
Funding: This work was supported by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (no. 771387) and a Natural Environment Research Council Independent Research Fellowship (no. NE/K009524/1).Collections
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