--- Philip Hart <philiph at SLAC.Stanford.EDU> wrote: > > > On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 Gaertk at aol.com wrote: > > > Damien Sullivan <phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu> writes: > > > > > and quite possibly a lack of sexual size dimorphism (no > > > textev either way, AFAIK) > > > > I'm pretty sure Dragaeran women are proportionately shorter > > than men, though still taller than Easterner men. Can't > > remember where I read it though. > > Fwiw (aka zilch) I've wondered about this for a few years without > coming across evidence either way. Except that armies seem to be > evenly mixed in gender, and I suspect that strength/size are > sufficiently > important in swordfighting that there can be very little sexual > dimorphism Are armies evenly mixed? Every time I check, it seems there are a *few* more men than women in the army and the Phoenix Guards. But I haven't kept track, so maybe I'm just seeing what I expect to see. The one I'm sure about is _Orca_, where there are three male cops and one female. But that's not much of a sample. Well, also in _Phoenix_, when six (?) goldcloaks attacked Noish-pa, only one was female. > (which is what I would pararectally expect for an artificially evolved > species). > > In case someone hasn't mentioned it, differences in size between male > and > female members of species is apparently strongly inversely related to > the > degree of monogamousness (monogamosity?). Monogamy? Among birds, this is a strong relation but not a universal one. In birds of prey, females are bigger than males--very noticeably, in falcons and bird-eating hawks--but they're monogamous. Jerry Friedman __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/