Emma is speaking bullshit. She has no idea what yshe ison about. Yet you believe what is written here without reading the actual papers. This paper is explicitly about why two and only two discrete sexes have ever evolved. academic.oup.com/molehr/artic...
this paper is about the evolution of gametes. we’re not talking sorting gametes by size. sex as commonly understood is about the set of organs/traits that are correlated with a sex. some people/animals are born with both a penis & vagina, or have an overlapping set of 2ndary characteristics
this range of traits is controlled by a number of different genes and processes, so you can’t sample a single cell to figure it out. some people are mosaics: in útero two twins merged into a single being, who now have some cells with xy and some cells with xx and so both sets of hormones organs etc
in summary the claim isn’t that there is a secret third gamete only that what we commonly think of “the set of organs and hormones and traits” that belong to one sex or the other sometimes naturally both manifest in a single individual. bimodal but not a strict binary
In this guy's view, the only thing that makes someone one or another sex is the gamete produced. Which is obviously dumb to anyone else.
Everything about the two sexes - male and female - always relates back to a gamete type. That is how the sexes evolved - from the divergence of anisogamic sex cells - sperm and eggs. This is basic biology.
okay but sex are you if have ovaries and a penis? what if you have a vagina and a penis but don’t produce gametes? what if you produce both sets of gametes?
The rules of this game are "name the actual medical condition" or we will just assume you are making things up.
let’s say you’re an androgen insensitive individual. you don’t produce gametes (iirc typically infertile) but while you have testicles your body looks externally female since your cells don’t respond to testosterone. what is this individual’s sex?
This is a complex medical condition, but if you are completely androgen insensitive then you body will develop as female - you are female.
Why? That would not follow from your claims about what sex means
Because when we talk about having a male or female **body** then it depends on how your body developed, doesn't it? Male of female phenotype.
Emma is speaking as a person who actually read the paper 🤣 The paper reviews two main mathematical models that explain anisogamy: gamete competition & gamete limitation. Gamete competition refers to the struggle among sperm to fertilize an egg, while gamete limitation refers to the scarcity of eggs
The authors argue that these two concepts are not separate but are two parts of the same evolutionary process that led to the divergence of gamete sizes. This paper does not say what you claim