Moss growth, development, morphology, and physiology dataset and code

A central problem in evolutionary biology is to identify the forces that
maintain genetic variation for fitness in natural populations. Sexual
antagonism, in which selection favors different variants in males and
females, can slow the transit of a polymorphism through a population or
can actively maintain fitness variation. The amount of sexually
antagonistic variation to be expected depends in part on the genetic
architecture of sexual dimorphism, about which we know relatively little.
Here, we used a multivariate quantitative genetic approach to examine the
genetic architecture of sexual dimorphism in a scent-based fertilization
syndrome of the moss  Ceratodon purpureus. We found sexual
dimorphism in numerous traits, consistent with a history of sexually
antagonistic selection. The cross-sex genetic correlations (rmf) were
generally heterogeneous with many values indistinguishable from zero,
which typically suggests that genetic constraints do not limit the
response to sexually antagonistic selection. However, we detected no
differentiation between the female- and male-specific trait (co)variance
matrices (Gf and Gm, respectively), meaning the evolution of sexual
dimorphism may be constrained. The cross-sex cross-trait covariance matrix
B contained both symmetric and asymmetric elements, indicating that the
response to sexually antagonistic or sexually concordant selection, and
the constraint to sexual dimorphism, is highly dependent on the traits
experiencing selection. The patterns of genetic variances and covariances
among these fitness components is consistent with partly sex-specific
genetic architectures having evolved in order to partially resolve
multivariate genetic constraints (i.e. sexual conflict), enabling the
sexes to evolve toward their sex-specific multivariate trait optima.