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A male (♂) organism is the physiological sex that produces sperm. Each spermatozoon can fuse with a larger female gamete, or ovum, in the process of fertilization. A male cannot reproduce sexually without access to at least one ovum from a female, but some organisms can reproduce both sexually and asexually. Most male mammals, including male humans, have a Y chromosome, which codes for the production of larger amounts of testosterone to develop male reproductive organs. Not all species share a common sex-determination system. In most animals, including humans, sex is determined genetically, but in some species it can be determined due to social, environmental or other factors. For example, ''Cymothoa exigua'' changes sex depending on the number of females present in the vicinity. ==Overview== The existence of two sexes seems to have been selected independently across different evolutionary lineages (see convergent evolution). The repeated pattern is sexual reproduction in isogamous species with two or more mating types with gametes of identical form and behavior (but different at the molecular level) to anisogamous species with gametes of male and female types to oogamous species in which the female gamete is very much larger than the male and has no ability to move. There is a good argument that this pattern was driven by the physical constraints on the mechanisms by which two gametes get together as required for sexual reproduction.〔Dusenbery, David B. (2009). ''Living at Micro Scale'', Chapter 20. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. ISBN 978-0-674-03116-6.〕 Accordingly, sex is defined operationally across species by the type of gametes produced (i.e.: spermatozoa vs. ova) and differences between males and females in one lineage are not always predictive of differences in another. Male/female dimorphism between organisms or reproductive organs of different sexes is not limited to animals; male gametes are produced by chytrids, diatoms and land plants, among others. In land plants, ''female'' and ''male'' designate not only the female and male gamete-producing organisms and structures but also the structures of the sporophytes that give rise to male and female plants. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「male」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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