1. Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501, USA
2. Section of Integrative Biology, University of Texas, 1 University Station C-0930, Austin, Texas 78712, USA

Correspondence to: G. S. van Doorn^1,2 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to G.S.vD. (Email: vandoorn@santafe.edu).

Abstract

Sex-determination genes are among the most fluid features of the genome in many groups of animals^{1, 2}. In some taxa the master sex-determining gene moves frequently between chromosomes, whereas in other taxa different genes have been recruited to determine the sex of the zygotes. There is a well developed theory for the origin of stable and highly dimorphic sex chromosomes seen in groups such as the eutherian mammals³. In contrast, the evolutionary lability of genetic sex determination in other groups remains largely unexplained¹. In this theoretical study, we show that an autosomal gene under sexually antagonistic selection can cause the spread of a new sex-determining gene linked to it. The mechanism can account for the origin of new sex-determining loci, the transposition of an ancestral sex-determining gene to an autosome, and the maintenance of multiple sex-determining factors in species that lack heteromorphic sex chromosomes.

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