Parent-offspring conflict in mate choice: a commentary on the study by van den Berg, Fawcett, Buunk, and Weissing

摘要

In a recent Evolution and Human Behavior paper, van den Berg, Fawcett, Buunk, and Weissing (2013) used a computational model to the address the problem of how parent–offspring conflict in human mate choice might have evolved. This paper will be referred to henceforth in this commentary as BFBW. Parent–offspring conflict in mate choice is a uniquely human concern and has important ramifications for understanding our social evolution, yet its existence has only recently been recognized and it remains poorly understood. The problem of understanding its evolution lends itself to analysis through computational modeling. However, the model presented in BFBW relies on a number of unrealistic assumptions. Our analysis of their model design suggests that the paper’s conclusion – that the evolution of parent–offspring conflict in mate choice is driven by sibling competition for parental resources in childrearing – is not supported. We describe below the assumptions of a model which we are questioning and propose an explanation for how they generated the results reported in the paper.