Gaulin S J, Boster J S
Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260.
Am J Phys Anthropol. 1992 Dec;89(4):467-75. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.1330890408.
Contemporary populations of Homo sapiens are sexually dimorphic on a variety of traits. In terms of stature, men are reliably between 4% and 10% taller than women in well-sampled human populations. Are cross-cultural differences in the magnitude of sexual dimorphism consistent with expectations from sexual selection theory? Prior studies have provided conflicting answers to this question in part because they failed to agree on how the force of sexual selection should or could be operationalized. Here we offer a simple and unbiased method for operationalizing sexual selection and retest two separate predictions from earlier work (Alexander et al., 1979) about its expected impact on stature dimorphism in a sample of 155 societies. Neither prediction matches the observed cross-cultural distribution of dimorphism. However, this is not the consequence of a random distribution of dimorphism across societies. Instead, the data exhibit a robust and unexpected pattern.
当代智人种群在多种特征上存在性别二态性。就身高而言，在抽样充分的人群中，男性确实比女性高4%到10%。性别二态性程度的跨文化差异是否符合性选择理论的预期？先前的研究对这个问题给出了相互矛盾的答案，部分原因是它们未能就如何操作化性选择的力量达成一致。在这里，我们提供了一种简单且无偏差的方法来操作化性选择，并在155个社会的样本中重新检验早期研究（亚历山大等人，1979年）关于其对身高二态性预期影响的两个独立预测。这两个预测都与观察到的二态性跨文化分布不匹配。然而，这并非二态性在各社会中随机分布的结果。相反，数据呈现出一种稳健且出乎意料的模式。
