If sperm are so cheap then why the seasonal adjustment? After all, as Dawkins said, ‘The word excess has no meaning for a male.’ ‘History has not been kind to this pronouncement,’ Zuleyma Tang-Martínez, emeritus professor of biology at the University of Missouri, has wryly noted. The other side of the Bateman equation – that males are preternaturally ‘eager for any female’ and their ‘fertility is seldom likely to be limited by sperm production’ – has also come under critical fire. A number of scientists have pointed out that the cost of a single spermatozoon may be trivial in comparison to an
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