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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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The greater male variability hypothesis and the related cluster of explanations is still the best theory I've seen bandied around for this.

The Y chromosome has a much higher mutation rate and its presence determines sex, which makes men the volatile and unstable genetic testing ground, and women the selectors and carriers of the successful experiments.

What?

No, the reason males are more risk taking is because a male can impregnate multiple females, where as, a female can only be impregnated by one male. So a male has a higher expected return to risk taking mating strategies.

Chickens are the opposite of humans where females have ZW chromosomes and males have ZZ chromosomes; however, roosters are famously aggressive and risk taking. You can't stop them from fighting if enclosed together.

In contrast to the XY sex-determination system and the X0 sex-determination system, where the sperm determines the sex, in the ZW system, the ovum determines the sex of the offspring. Males are the homogametic sex (ZZ), while females are the heterogametic sex (ZW). The Z chromosome is larger and has more genes, similarly to the X chromosome in the XY system.

Chickens are the opposite of humans where females have ZW chromosomes and males have ZZ chromosomes; however, roosters are famously aggressive and risk taking. You can't stop them from fighting if enclosed together.

Males are indeed the homogametic sex in the ZW system, but the argument still stands if Z-linked genes evolve faster than W-linked ones, making females more genetically stable, which is actually something we have observed in birds and in snakes.

If we could find a species with a neutral or female biased mutation rate where males still exhibit more risk taking behavior, that would be an issue for this theory, but I don't know of any.

the reason males are more risk taking is because a male can impregnate multiple females, where as, a female can only be impregnated by one male. So a male has a higher expected return to risk taking mating strategies.

The argument from the economics of reproduction is also sound in my opinion, but it isn't mutually exclusive with the genetic one.