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Cited by 481

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 26 of the 26 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Constraints in the Evolution of Sex Ratio Adjustment

West, Stuart A., Sheldon, Ben C.·2002·Science

Abstract

When the relative fitness of male and female offspring varies with environmental conditions, evolutionary theory predicts that parents should adjust the sex of their offspring accordingly. Qualitative and even quantitative support for this prediction is striking in some taxa but much less convincing in others. Explaining such variation across taxa in the fit of sex ratio theory remains a major challenge. We use meta-analysis to test the role of two constraints in the evolution of sex ratios. Based on analysis of sex ratio skews in birds and wasps, we show that (i) mechanisms of sex determination do not necessarily constrain the evolution of sex ratio adjustment, and (ii) parental ability to predict their offsprings' environment influences the evolution of sex ratio patterns across taxa. More generally, our results show that multiple constraints may determine the precision of adaptation.

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Metadata

Authors
West, S. A., & Sheldon, B. C.
Venue
Science
Published
2002-03
Volume
295
Issue
5560
Pages
1685-1688
ISSN
  • 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
  • 1095-9203
OpenAlex
W1975595302
Cited by
481
References
26
FWCI
40.86
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Constraints in the Evolution of Sex Ratio Adjustment. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.1069043
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West, S. A., & Sheldon, B. C. (2002). Constraints in the Evolution of Sex Ratio Adjustment. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1069043

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.