LIFESCI 3C03 Chapter 7: Ecology Selfish Gene Reading Chapter 7
8 Mar 2017
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Child-bearing: bringing a new individual into the world. Child-bearing and child-caring can compete with one another if the individual must choose between caring for an existing child or bearing a new one. A pure caring strategy cannot be evolutionarily stable because it does not add new members to the population, and bearer mutants would quickly take over the new generation. Parental care is an example of kin selection. From the point of the selfish gene, there is no difference in caring for a baby brother and a baby son. People confuse the fact that child-bearing and child-caring are separate entities because they are generally intertwined with one another in mammal species. Population size depends on births, deaths, immigrations, and emigrations. Population growth depends on when people have children, as well as on how many they have. Populations grow by a certain proportion each generation, so spacing out reproduction timing can slow population growth.
