Greg’s post on the slow pace of evolution of sexual dimorphism referred to a Rogers and Mukherjee paper which concluded that this sort of phenotypic difference between males and females would evolve very slowly (common sense, selection for size in males would result in a correlated response in increase in size of their daughters). It was published in 1992 in Evolution, and I can’t seem to find it online (I’m not paying for JSTOR!). But, I did find this interesting paper: Human size evolution: no evolutionary allometric relationship between male and female stature. The paper analyzes cross-cultural statures and concludes that Rensch’s Rule, where sexual size dimorphism increases with size where males are the larger sex, but decreases with size where females are larger,1 does not apply to humans. The paper does imply there are mild deviations from the modal 1.07 stature ratio between males and females, though it seems possible this could be explained by different nutritional intake when it is greater than the modal value. If you are not interested in the technical details of allometry the full paper does have a long list of heights of males and females for various populations that might interest data nuts….
1 – To be clear, this rule is generally understood in the interspecific context, but, it should also apply within species with a reasonable amount of population substructure.
Posted by razib at 09:15 PM