Synonyms
Definition
A characteristic difference in body size (height, length, mass) between males and females of a population or species.
Introduction
Sex differences in adult body size are common throughout the animal kingdom and are generally thought to arise from the joint influences of sexual selection, which often (but not always) favors large body size in males, and fecundity selection, which often (but not always) favors large size in females. In humans, as in other organisms, these inferences are based in large part on comparative studies of correlated evolutionary patterns between sexual dimorphism and proxies for the intensity of sexual or fecundity selection across entire evolutionary lineages, such as primates or mammals. The evolution of sexual size dimorphism is also constrained by the shared genome of a species, which can give rise to intralocus sexual conflict over body size and other traits. Adaptive hypotheses for sexual size dimorphism...
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Cox, R. (2021). Sexual Size Dimorphism. In: Shackelford, T.K., Weekes-Shackelford, V.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_1678
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_1678
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