2026/07/21 by A M Aramati Casper, Anne Marie Casper, Karen M Warkentin +1
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Animal Behavior and Reproduction #Philosophy and History of Science #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
paper · doi:10.1093/icb/icag127
As humans, we bring biases based on our own vertebrate, mammalian biology into the way we conceptualize the world. This includes how we discuss the range of concepts we reference with the term sex and the implicit assumptions that are often embedded in how we discuss life cycles and reproduction. These assumptions situate diplontic life cycles, unitary body plans, and amphigonic reproduction as normative and frame sex (meiosis and syngamy) and reproduction (the creation of new individuals) as inherently intertwined. We draw from the social science theoretical framework of master narrative theory to discuss these implicit assumptions. Master narrative theory typically is used to articulate normative expectations for humans in specific socio-cultural contexts. Here we use it to reveal normative expectations about organisms that are common in western modern science. Following this explication, we discuss frameworks and language that biologists working with modular metazoans and plants have developed to discuss complex sexual variation, addressing multi-level modularity and continuous, quantitative variation in investment into or reproductive success via male and female gametes. We consider ways these "specialized" approaches can be useful for broadly comparative work, across organisms with a range of sexual simplicity and complexity, and identify challenges to greater conceptual integration. As a step toward tools for improving conceptual integration across sexual systems and body plans, we introduce a graphical system for mapping anisogamete-production strategy across levels of modularity. We call for further conversations that build on the "Sex Across Origins" symposium at the 2026 Society for Integrative Biology conference, considering key concepts in the biology of sex and reproduction through the prism of different kinds of organisms. This practice can help break apart common oversimplifications and overgeneralizations, reveal the breadth or limits of concepts, and generate insights from the ways that concepts fail for subsets of organisms, suggesting paths forward to better understand and articulate the complexity and variation of sex and reproduction.