Richard Dawkins zu den Unterschieden zwischen den Geschlechtern

Ein interessanter Text in „Das egoistische Gen“:

Suppose we start with two sexes that have none of the particular attributes of males and females. Call them by the neutral names A and B. All we need specify is that every mating has to be between an A and a B. Now, any animal, whether an A or a B, faces a trade-off. Time and effort devoted to fighting with rivals cannot be spent on rearing existing offspring, and vice versa. Any animal can be expected to balance its effort between these rival claims. The point I am about to come to is that the As may settle at a different balance from the Bs and that, once they do, there is likely to be an escalating disparity between them

To see this, suppose that the two sexes, the As and the Bs, differ from one another, right from the start, in whether they can most influence their success by investing in children or by investing in fighting (I’ll use ‚fighting‘ to stand for all kinds of direct competition within one sex). Initially the difference between the sexes can be very slight, since my point will be that there is an inherent tendency for it to grow. Say the As start out with fighting making a greater contribution to their reproductive success than parental behaviour does; the 5s, on the other hand, start out with parental behaviour contributing slightly more than fighting to variation in their reproductive success. This means, for example, that although an A of course benefits from parental care, the difference between a successful carer and an unsuccessful carer among the As is smaller than the difference between a successful fighter and an unsuccessful fighter among the As. Among the Bs, just the reverse is true. So, for a given amount of effort, an A can do itself good by fighting, whereas a B is more likely to do itself good by shifting its effort away from fighting and towards parental care.

In subsequent generations, therefore, the As will fight a bit more than their parents, the 5s will fight a bit less and care a bit more than their parents. Now the difference between the best A and the worst A with respect to fighting will be even greater, the difference between the best A and the worst A with respect to caring will be even less. Therefore an A has even more to gain by putting its effort into fighting, even less to gain by putting its effort into caring. Exactly the opposite will be true of the Bs as the generations go by. The key idea here is that a small initial difference between the sexes can be self-enhancing: selection can start with an initial, slight difference and make it grow larger and larger, until the As become what we now call males, the 5s what we now call females. The initial difference can be small enough to arise at random. After all, the starting conditions of the two sexes are unlikely to be exactly identical

(…) The separation into sperms and eggs is only one aspect of a more basic separation of sexual roles. Instead of treating the sperm-egg separation as primary, and tracing all the characteristic attributes of males and females back to it, we now have an argument that explains the sperm-egg separation and other aspects all in the same way. We have to assume only that there are two sexes who have to mate with each other; we need know nothing more about those sexes. Starting from this minimal assumption, we positively expect that, however equal the two sexes may be at the start, they will diverge into two sexes specializing in opposite and complementary reproductive techniques. The separation between sperms and eggs is a symptom of this more general separation, not the cause of it.

Das die Geschlechter sich unterscheiden ist also eigentlich recht logisch.