ArticleIntegrative and comparative biology2026
Synthesizing Sex/es Across Scales and Lineages: Centering Plants, Algae, Fungi, Protists, and Modular Metazoans.
Article in Integrative and comparative biology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolution, Development, and the Incoherence of Sex: A Framework for Multiple Sex Concepts.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Hermaphrodite, Gonochorist, and More: Navigating the Complexities of Sex-Related Language in Biology.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Review
- Teaching Accurate Sex-related Biology: Approaches for More Socially Just Instruction.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Centering Biodiversity: Integrating the Complexity of Sex Into a Developmental Biology Course.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Sexes Are Polymorphisms: Describing and Understanding Sexual Diversity as Phenotypic Variation.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
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 sociocultural 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 multilevel 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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.