Saturday, October 14, 2006

Sexual dimorphism differences across races? I've read that sexual dimorphism is positively correlated with polygyny and less paternal investment, so I looked to see if this might be true across human races that are known to differ on these things. Wikipedia lists height studies from all around the world, so I calculated the percent differences in height between males and females for all available black and Asian samples. The results:

American blacks 8.41%
Japan 7.60
South Korea 8.13
Taiwan 7.72
Singapore 6.21

Male-female differences are consistently smaller for Asian groups than for blacks, but not by much, so interpret as you will.

1 comment:

  1. The Costa et al meta-analysis of sex differences in personality traits found lowest dimorphism among Collectivist cultures, namely African and Asian, and the most among the Individualist cultures, namely European & derivatives.

    Apparently, sexual selection takes tens of times longer to produce differences compared to other forms of selection. That means that pronounced sex differences are probably really old, and may have only changed in slight degree in the past 10,000 years. Most racial changes, which affect women & men both, are probably recent, within the time since the races diverged, and especially in the past 10,000 years.

    Some evolutionary psychologists only want to focus on sex differences, avoiding or denying race differences, but of all global inter-group variation, variation among races is more likely to evolve and is more apparent to anyone with two eyes, compared to sex differences.

    http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003689.html
    http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003704.html

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