Big Balls Theory: Testicles drive genetic evolution

Large testicles drive genetic evolution, with animals with larger testis having an increased speed of genome evolution, researchers have found.

Published in the advanced online edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution, a team of scientists looked at how testicle size impacted on the evolution of genes.

Among most primates, females will mate with multiple partners, causing competition among males to pass along their genes.

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Study author Alex Wong, of Carleton University in Ottawa, a researcher on the genetics of adaptation, used data from 55 species of primates to look for a correlation between evolutionary rates across genomes and the weight of the animal’s testes.

Read coverage of the full, original story: Big Testicles Drive Genetic Evolution: Size Does Matter After All