Sexual Selection and Parental Investment
Sexual selection is an important part of parental investment. Females will not only choose males with good fitness and genes. They will search for those with high status and resources and those who indicate the interest to invest in the offspring after it’s born. This is not only relevant in the Homo sapiens but also in the animal kingdom. For instance, the alpha lion will usually be the one who copulates with most if not all the female members of the group. Large amount of resources and territory may be attractive for females because it will secure a healthy environment for their offspring, indicating reproductive success. However, this also suggests that there will be a greater variance of successful mating in males than females.
In species where both sexes invest highly in parental care, mutual choosiness is expected to arise. An example of this is seen in Crested Auklets, where parents share equal responsibility in incubating their single egg and raising the chick. In Crested Auklets both sexes are ornamented.
Read more about this topic: Parental Investment
Famous quotes containing the words selection, parental and/or investment:
“Judge Ginsburg’s selection should be a model—chosen on merit and not ideology, despite some naysaying, with little advance publicity. Her treatment could begin to overturn a terrible precedent: that is, that the most terrifying sentence among the accomplished in America has become, “Honey—the White House is on the phone.””
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“With the breakdown of the traditional institutions which convey values, more of the burdens and responsibility for transmitting values fall upon parental shoulders, and it is getting harder all the time both to embody the virtues we hope to teach our children and to find for ourselves the ideals and values that will give our own lives purpose and direction.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“The only thing that was dispensed free to the old New Bedford whalemen was a Bible. A well-known owner of one of that city’s whaling fleets once described the Bible as the best cheap investment a shipowner could make.”
—For the State of Massachusetts, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)