ALife Investigation of Parental Investment in Reproductive Strategies

摘要

Many organisms nourish and care for their offspring, boosting the offspring's reproductive potential. Trivers (1972) recognized that such parental investment, when made differentially across the sexes, could explain the existence of sexually dimorphic behaviour. However, parental investment in nature is difficult to measure, and explanations involving parental investment are hard to verify. Here we use an ALife simulation to investigate the effect of explicit, numerical parental investments on two reproductive strategies of interest ― consensual mating and rape. With some preliminary empirical results, we demonstrate the potential of an ALife approach to evolutionary psychology.