Correlated Evolution of Allometry and Sexual Dimorphism across Higher Taxa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Empirical evidence suggests that Rensch's rule of allometric scaling of male and female body size, which states that body size divergence is greater across males than across females of a clade, is not universal. In fact, quantitative genetic theory indicates that the sex under historically stronger directional selection will exhibit greater interspecific variance in size. Thus, the pattern of covariance between allometry of male and female body size and sexual size dimorphism (SSD) across related clades allows a test of this causal hypothesis for macroevolutionary trends in SSD. We compiled a data set of published body size estimates from the amphibians, a class with predominantly female-biased SSD, to examine variation in allometry and SSD among clades. Our results indicate that females become the more size-variant sex across species in a family as the magnitude of SSD in that family increases. This rejects Rensch's rule and implicates selection on females as a driver of both amphibian allometry and SSD. Further, when we combine our data into a single analysis of allometry for the class, we find a significant nonlinear allometric relationship between female body size and male body size. These data suggest that allometry changes significantly as a function of size. Our results illustrate that the relationship between female size and male size varies with both the degree of sexual dimorphism and the body size of a clade.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".