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Concept
Parental investment
Summary
Parental investment, in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, is any parental expenditure (e.g. time, energy, resources) that benefits offspring. Parental investment may be performed by both males and females (biparental care), females alone (exclusive maternal care) or males alone (exclusive paternal care). Care can be provided at any stage of the offspring's life, from pre-natal (e.g. egg guarding and incubation in birds, and placental nourishment in mammals) to post-natal (e.g. food provisioning and protection of offspring).
Parental investment theory, a term coined by Robert Trivers in 1972, predicts that the sex that invests more in its offspring will be more selective when choosing a mate, and the less-investing sex will have intra-sexual competition for access to mates. This theory has been influential in explaining sex differences in sexual selection and mate preferences, throughout the animal kingdom and in humans.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. This introduced the concept of natural selection to the world, as well as related theories such as sexual selection. For the first time, evolutionary theory was used to explain why females are "coy" and males are "ardent" and compete with each other for females' attention. In 1930, Ronald Fisher wrote The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, in which he introduced the modern concept of parental investment, introduced the sexy son hypothesis, and introduced Fisher's principle. In 1948, Angus John Bateman published an influential study of fruit flies in which he concluded that because female gametes are more costly to produce than male gametes, the reproductive success of females was limited by the ability to produce ovum, and the reproductive success of males was limited by access to females. In 1972, Trivers continued this line of thinking with his proposal of parental investment theory, which describes how parental investment affects sexual behavior.
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