Biology > QUESTIONS & ANSWERS > University of Washington, SeattleBIO A 208Assignment 9 (All)

University of Washington, SeattleBIO A 208Assignment 9

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Bass 1 Carter Bass Professor Hill Sex and Evolution 8 March 2020 1. Marriage is a human universal, presumably because it serves certain fitness-related functions.  What are the possible benefits of marriage?  Do these fitness benefits accrue equally to both sexes? Explain. The type of investment valued by each sex differs (i.e. women value economic investment, men value physiological investment), which causes these benefits to accrue differently for each sex.  How do patterns of divorce illuminate the functions of marriage? 2. While humans provide a large amount of parental investment relative to that observed in many other species, there are expectations.  How might patterns of child abuse illuminate evolved parental motivations? Child abuse often occurs in situations where bearing or investing in the child is perceived as a greater cost to the parents than a benefit (i.e. investing in the child may incite greater costs to the parents at the time of conception than benefit to them), which may push them to neglect the child or commit infanticide, indicating Child abuse is the opposite of parental investment; where parental motivation is the highest, we expect the lowest rates of child abuse.  What are the observed patterns? ild. Also more common in household with at least one stepparent than in households with both biological parents (the offspring does not belong to the stepparent, so the lack of genetic relationship demands less investment).  To what extent do they conform to evolutionary expectations? Does the parents’ investment actually improve the reproductive success of the child? If not, there’s no reason for them to invest, which is where we see child abuse occur. 3. Matrilineal inheritance is rare in human societies.  What is it?  Under what conditions is it most likely to be adaptive?  Under what conditions does it actually occur? 4. Parents do not always invest equally in sons and daughters.  Under what conditions might parents benefit by investing preferentially in one sex or the other?  Discuss the extent to which the Mukogodo discussed by Lee Cronk conform to these expectations.

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