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Parental Investment—Minding the Kids or Keeping Control?

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Feminism and Evolutionary Biology

Abstract

Changing perspectives often reveals the ways in which we become trapped by our own ideas and terminology. Here I attempt to look at parental investment and sexual selection from a different perspective. Traditionally, parental investment is viewed as a nearly universal characteristic of females that makes them limited in their rate of reproduction relative to males. As a consequence, so sexual selection theory goes, males have evolved ways to compete for access to females and/or differentially to attract them as mates. The battle between the sexes has been seen as one of males avoiding the costs (to their reproductive potential) of parental investment and females trying to get males to share in the investment.

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Authors
  1. Jonathan K. Waage
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Ecology and Women’s Studies Program, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, 30602, USA

    Patricia Adair Gowaty

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Waage, J.K. (1997). Parental Investment—Minding the Kids or Keeping Control?. In: Gowaty, P.A. (eds) Feminism and Evolutionary Biology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5985-6_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5985-6_24

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