Sex variability

Abstract

The question of variation has long been of interest to scientists. Since the time of Darwin we find investigators endeavoring to determine which sex is the more variable. In a well known controversy on this subject between Havelock Ellis and Karl Pearson, the conflicting opinions are clearly illustrated as shown by the following quotations: "A precise knowledge of the actual facts of the life of men and women forbids us to dogmatise rigidly concerning the respective spheres of men and women. It is a matter which experience alone can demonstrate in detail. It lays the axe at the root of many pseudo-scientific superetitions. Yet there are certain general conclusions which have again and again presented themselves, even when we have been occupied in considering very diverse aspects of the physical and psychic phenomena of human life. One of these is the greater variability of the male; this is true for almost the whole of the field we have covered, and it has social and practical consequences of the widest significance. The whole of our human civilization would have been a different thing, if in early zoological epochs the male had not acquired a greater variational tendency than the female."--Page 1.