Sex-biased immunity is driven by relative differences in reproductive investment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sex differences in immunity are often observed, with males generally having a weaker immune system than females. However, recent data in a sex-role-reversed species in which females compete to mate with males suggest that sexually competitive females have a weaker immune response. These findings support the hypothesis that sexual dimorphism in immunity has evolved in response to sex-specific fitness returns of investment in traits such as parental investment and longevity, but the scarcity of data in sex-reversed species prevents us from drawing general conclusions. Using an insect species in which males make a large but variable parental investment in their offspring, we use two indicators of immunocompetence to test the hypothesis that sex-biased immunity is determined by differences in parental investment. We found that when the value of paternal investment was experimentally increased, male immune investment became relatively greater than that of females. Thus, in this system, in which the direction of sexual competition is plastic, the direction of sex-biased immunity is also plastic and appears to track relative parental investment.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".