Evolution and Bad Boyfriends:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/evolution-and-bad-boyfriends.html?_r=0
By: Piet van den Berg and Tim W. Fawcett
Published October 11, 2013
Summary:
Studies have shown that all over the world parents and children hardly agree on a suitable partner in life. When behavioral characteristics are shared throughout most of humanity it implies that the cause might be because of evolution. A simulation was designed and ran explaining how it is possible for evolution to lead to such an uncomfortable parent-child confrontation. Parents want as many grandchildren as possible, and to do so they split their available resources between their children equally so the most possible number of surviving grandchildren are produced. However, the children would care more about producing their own offspring than their siblings producing offspring, so they would try to gain as much resources as possible from their parents. In the study, a computer simulated model was built with a large number of males and females in a population. The males were given certain degrees of ability to provide resources for their children and the females were given a variable amount of preference for this quality in men. The model was ran with offspring inheriting resource providing abilities and preferences from their parents, with possible mutations. The parents of the female was allowed to have an opinion on her mate, and they were also allowed to distribute resources to their children. Over many generations, parents were found to invest more in children who had a mate who could not provide many resources so as to help her produce s many offspring as her sisters whose mates could provide more resources. The daughters would start to use this factor by choosing a less supportive mate to receive the help from their parents. This lowered the standards of the daughters, but raised the standards of the parents.
Connection:
This study connects to what we learned in class about evolution and the inheritance of traits. Although we did not study sexual selection, the concept is similar to natural selection: survival of the fittest. In sexual selection, males who were able to reproduce more because of certain characteristics were able to pass these down to many offspring and so on. In natural selection, if the organism had a trait that benefited them in their environment and further allowed them to grow and reproduced, their offspring would inherit these traits. This article shows how evolution cannot only lead to strange physical features of an animal, but also strange behavioral features in a human.
How does the parent approval rate differ between fathers and mothers? Is there a difference?
ReplyDeleteDoes this parent approval factor also cause a similar conflict between boys and their parents concerning their girlfriends?
ReplyDeleteOften, a boy would be congratulated by their parents if they were to get a girlfriend, while girls are usually given a stern warning or threat by an older brother or dad about him "breaking her heart". This is caused by the "bad boy" stereotype of girls going for the bad boy who will break their heart because, as the study shows, girls' standards decline over time. This decline also means that it would be easier for a boy to get a mate of higher quality without much effort. So, parents are usually happy when their son gets a girlfriend. I other words, no, this does not cause a similar conflict.
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