I beg to differ with the quote, attributed to Ethan Temeles in this article: “This is the first really unambiguous example of ecology playing a role in the morphological differences between the sexes.” The statement exhibits the annoyingly common practice among zoologists to think and generalize as if only animals (and, even worse, only vertebrates) and their literature matter. The plant literature contains numerous published studies, for multiple species, of ecologically driven sexual differentiation and displacement in vascular plants alone.

Michael Grant
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colo.