Which term is the measure of variation from the mean of the reproductive potential of one sex compared with the other?

• A. Cladistics
• B. Reproductive potential
• C. Reproductive variance
• D. Biological species concept

Answer: (C)

The main idea here is using a statistic that captures how spread out reproductive success is around its average, and then comparing that spread between the sexes. Reproductive variance does exactly that: it measures how much individuals differ from the mean in the number of offspring they produce. When one sex shows higher variance, it means a few individuals achieve most of the reproductive payoff while others have little or none, which is a common pattern in many species due to mating competition and mate choice.

Why this fits: it directly quantifies dispersion in reproductive success, allowing a clear comparison of how variable reproductive potential is between the sexes. In contrast, cladistics is about reconstructing evolutionary relationships, the Biological Species Concept defines what counts as a species, and reproductive potential describes capacity to reproduce without addressing how uneven or distributed that potential is across individuals.