>
> I don't think that fiddling with sex ratios would be evolutionarily
> stable. When dealing with a conventional sexual system, the
> male-female ratio is 50-50 for a simple reason.
>
> So, I imagine that the ratio of vars to males is 50-50. On Stratos,
> sexually created children should have the same sex ratios as on
> Earth...males are just another form of var.
But it says in the book that "one in 4 of the non-clones is
male". Now that might very well NOT be an exact ratio, but there
are many factors which might make the ratio of males to vars not
50/50. Consider their chances of reproductive success: A male
has to have a var child to pass on his genes. But a var has two
routes, she can either have the var child, or a clone. Note that
having a clone is at least in the short term a more efficient
reproductive strategy, since all of one's genes are passed on
instead of just half. If reproduction is more difficult for a
male than a var, one would expect their proportion of the population
to drop until the lessened competition made up for that extra
difficulty reproducing.
> The one problem I see with this set-up is that I don't see how males
> benefit evolutionarily from sparking asexual reproduction. I would
> imagine that males would become more and more indifferent to
> sparking...
This is a part that I don't really buy. Certainly, males
should not expend a lot of energy chasing women in Winter, since they
have no chance of reproducing at that time. But that they need to
be "coaxed"? I mean, how hard is sparking, anyway?
---David
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
