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Originally Posted by Marie Monday
Isn't sexually dimorphic that there are discrete differences instead of a continuous scale, like the colour of ducks? That doesn't apply to humans, apart from sexual organs.
I don't see what the point is though. What does it matter whether male and female sex are distinguishable or not?
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not necessarily. All it means is this:
distinct difference in size or appearance between the sexes of an animal in addition to difference between the sexual organs themselves.
Some instances of sexual dimorphism are more obvious than others but there are often scales within the sexes of sexually dimorphic species. Male lions are bigger on average than female lions but also some m male lions are bigger than other males and the same with females. Birds with distinct color patterns in the males can vary from male to male etc.
As for whether it applies to humans, we have lower levels of sexual dimorphism compared to some other species but still pronounced enough to be both recognizable and relevant:
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Sexual dimorphism refers to differences in size and shape between females and males of the same species. The term sexual dimorphism is usually used only for the secondary sexual characteristics, which are unrelated to reproduction. Some examples of sexual dimorphism include differences in stature, weight, morphology of the face, cognitive development, mortality, and disease prevalence. Although humans exhibit low levels of sexual dimorphism compared to other animals, differences between females and males are numerous. Evolutionary, sexually dimorphic traits develop through the process of sexual selection. Furthermore, mating system, body size, gender roles, and quality of environment also play an important role in determining the levels of sexual dimorphism. Sexual dimorphism has an important place in biological anthropology. In bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology, morphological and metric traits are used to estimate sex of the skeletal remains, while in studies of human evolution the level of sexual dimorphism is used to reconstruct social behavior. Generally, the majority of studies tend to focus on adults, because sexual dimorphism is not well pronounced before puberty.
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https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...same%20species.