Human Reproductive Behaviour (5)
- The relationship between sexual selection and human reproductive behaviour
- Evolutionary explanations of parental investment: for example, sex differences, parent-offspring conflict
Parent-offspring conflict concerns conflicts that arise over how much parental investment parents give to offspring. This occurs because the nature of the genetic relationships between parents and offspring means that they each have different priorities.
Published in
Human Reproductive Behaviour
There are several explanations of sex differences in parental investment: that females typically invest more because they have already invested the most (Trivers, 1972); that females invest more because males have less parental certainty; or that females are less likely to have more offspring in the future (Gross and Sargent, 2005).
Published in
Human Reproductive Behaviour
Tuesday, 14 July 2009 06:49
Evolutionary Explanations of Parental Investment
Written by Keiron Walsh
Human beings, in evolutionary terms, are vehicles for ensuring the continued existence of the genes they contain. They do this through sexual reproduction: the greater the number of offspring a human being produces the greater the probability that any genes it contains will continue to exist and the greater the probability that at least some of the offspring will go on to produce offspring of their own.
Published in
Human Reproductive Behaviour
Monday, 22 June 2009 13:49
The relationship between sexual selection and human reproductive behaviour
Written by Keiron Walsh
Sexual Selection
Sexual selection is a special type of natural selection that is concerned with an organisms ability to successfully reproduce. Survival is no guarantee of passing gene variants to the next generation, that can only happen if the animal reproduces.
Published in
Human Reproductive Behaviour
Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations."In fact, evolution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next." - Curtis and Barnes (1989)
Published in
Human Reproductive Behaviour
