What is the point of spotting sex differences if science cannot explain them?
Excerpt: “Why don’t we demand explanations of the mechanisms that produce observed sex differences?”
My comment: As we indicated in our 1996 Hormones and Behavior review, sex differences are nutrient-dependent and pheromone-controlled at the advent of sexually differentiated cell types in yeasts.
Conserved molecular mechanisms and the mammalian model of hormone-organized and hormone-activated sex differences in behavior were subsequently extended to invertebrates and to life history transitions in the honeybee model organism.
Using the honeybee model organism as the link from microbes to humans, I reviewed what was known about the biological basis for differences in morphological and behavioral phenotypes in species from microbes to man in Human pheromones and food odors: epigenetic influences on the socioaffective nature of evolved behaviors
I then provided examples of how nutrient-dependent DNA methylation leads to amino acid substitutions that differentiate cell types in individuals of different species in my most recent published work: Nutrient–dependent / pheromone–controlled adaptive evolution: a model.
All the details of biologically based cause and effect in the context of nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled cell type differentiation have become clear from the perspectives of physics, chemistry, and conserved molecular mechanisms. However, since evolutionary theorists cannot explain how mutations and natural selection led to the evolution of sex differences, they are motivated to keep serious scientists from explaining the fact that sex differences in cell types and in organisms from species of yeasts to mammals result from ecological variation and nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled ecological adaptations. There’s a model for that!
Why haven’t you learned more about the model? One reason is that reviewers refused to review the submission of the manuscript I subsequently posted to figshare.com
This was an invited review: Nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled ecological adaptations: from atoms to ecosystems
