Register here by 12 August 2024
STIAS Fellow Diethard Tautz, from the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology will present a public lecture with the title:
The evolutionary fluidity of sex differences
Abstract: The occurrence of sexual reproduction in all living forms suggests that sex should be one of the evolutionary most stable pillars of life. But already Darwin pointed out that the effects of sexual selection can lead to very fast evolution and extreme phenotypes, such as the famous peacock’s tail. In fact, evolutionary biologists still struggle with the question of why sex is so universal, since it seems often to run contrary to short-term ecological optimization. As molecular evolutionists, we have studied the genes that make the sexes different. We include not only the genes of the reproductive organs, but focus specifically on the genes that generate male-female differences in shared organs, such as the brain and the heart. We ask then how individuals differ with respect to these so-called “sex-biased” genes. It turns out that at this individual level, sex differences are much better described as overlapping distributions, rather than binary states. Moreover, the genes that determine the sex differences show an extremely fast evolutionary turnover, indicative of a continuous evolutionary conflict. We conclude that there is an evolutionary fluidity in sex determination, resulting in a spectrum of phenotypes in individuals. This implies that a simple binary distinction into females and males does not properly reflect the biological reality of sex differences.
Bio: Diethard Tautz obtained his PhD in Tübingen in 1983. After postdoc positions at the Department of Genetics in Cambridge (1983-1985) and the Max-Planck Institute in Tübingen (1985-1988), he started an own group at the Department of Genetics in Munich (1988-1990) and became then Professor at the Department of Zoology in Munich (1991-1998). From 1998 to 2006 he held the chair for “Evolutionary Genetics” at the Department of Genetics in Cologne and since 2007 he headed the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön/Germany. Diethard Tautz is member of EMBO and the German National Academy Leopoldina. In 2020 he received the Federal Cross of Merit for his achievements in the development of DNA fingerprinting.
