Abstract
At any given age, men are more likely to die than women, but women have poorer health at older ages. This is referred to as the “male-female, health-survival paradox”, which is not fully understood. Here, we provide a general solution to the paradox that relies on intralocus sexual conflict, where alleles segregating in the population have late-acting positive effects on male fitness, but negative effects on female health. Using an evolutionary modelling framework, we show that male-benefit, female-detriment alleles can spread if they are expressed after female reproduction stops. We provide support for our conflict based solution using experimental Drosophila data. Our results show that selecting for increased late-life male reproductive effort can increase male fitness but have a detrimental effect on female fitness. Furthermore, we show that late-life male fertility is negatively genetically correlated with female health. Our study suggests that intralocus sexual conflict could resolve the health-survival paradox.
Highlights
At any given age, men are more likely to die than women, but women have poorer health at older ages
While sex differences in behaviour may contribute towards the male–female, healthsurvival paradox, the consistent observation of lower female mortality but poorer female health at older ages in human populations across the world suggests that this paradox has, at least in part, a genetic basis[2]
Intralocus sexual conflict could cause sex differences in health if there are sexually antagonistic alleles segregating in a population that increase male fitness but reduce female health
Summary
Men are more likely to die than women, but women have poorer health at older ages. Men are more likely to die than women in most ageclasses, but are healthier than women late-in-life[2,3] To be clear, this is not just due to the selective loss of low quality males, as female mortality rates are lower than male rates at most ages[2] despite poorer female health. The aim of this paper is to highlight that as well as explaining sex differences in health and aging in general, intralocus sexual conflict could be central to a long-standing puzzle in medical sciences: why do men die, while women suffer?. Females that express alleles that are positively associated with male fitness can experience reduced health
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