Synonyms
Definition
Parent-offspring conflict describes the competition that arises between parent and offspring over issues involving differences in optimal parental investment (PI).
Introduction
Sexual reproduction is a form of offspring production that first evolved approximately 1 billion years ago, since becoming the dominant form of reproduction across known species. The main selective advantage of this form of reproduction over asexual reproduction is that of complementation or the process by which combining two different alleles together can effectively mask deleterious mutations that exists on one allele (Archetti 2010). This decreases the mutation load each generation compared to asexual reproducers. One by-product of this advantage, however, is that the genetic relatedness between parent and offspring is typically less than 100%. Thus, genetically related parents will, in most sexually reproducing species, differ approximately 50% from their child...
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References
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Hunt, M.E., Sefcek, J. (2018). Parent-Offspring Conflict. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1555-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1555-1
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