The risk of harm in sex selection stems from the fact that parents don’t desire any child, they want a child of a particular sex, who is to remain within the limits of binary gender roles.
The National Health and Medical Research Council call for public submissions on whether sex selection should be allowed without a medical reason recognises changing social attitudes.
What is it that makes rockstars so attractive to the opposite sex? Turns out Charles Darwin had it pegged hundreds of years ago – and it has a lot to do with peacocks. In The Descent of Man, and Selection…
In romantic circles, reproduction is viewed as a harmonious venture between the sexes. After all, if you aim to produce the best offspring possible, wouldn’t it also be best to cooperate with your partner…
It’s not always easy to tell if a fish is male or female: they look more or less the same. But there are exceptions, such as guppies and, as with humans, guppy genitalia varies in size across the species…
What is a male? What is a female? If you were to conduct a survey, most people would probably have little difficulty expressing some fundamental differences. After all, we learn to tell boys apart from…
Rearing young is a costly business that often affects an individual’s own future survival or reproduction prospects. And so it makes sense for individuals to find ways to ensure the energy they spend on…
Here’s some good news: having more sexual partners makes females more fertile. A recent study on Trinidadian guppies has shown that females who mate with multiple males produce more grand-offspring than…
What transforms noise from album filler to dancefloor killer? Why do some tracks turn us on while others make us tune out? DarwinTunes, a computer program that employs the principles of natural selection…
When it comes to selecting a mate, females are traditionally thought of as the choosy sex; males, meanwhile, aren’t thought to be particularly picky. This makes sense for many species – the sex that invests…
The penis. It comes in so many different shapes and sizes … and that’s just in humans. As you would imagine, different species have very different penises. The males in most mammal species, including cats…
On the face of it, a sperm’s work seems pretty straightforward: locate an egg and fertilise it. Job done. But in the world of a sessile broadcast-spawning marine invertebrate – immobile organisms in which…