User:Wolayte/sandbox

Background

Only 10% of mammals exhibit biparental care and humans are among these species. The rest 90% of the species depend on maternal care only. Biparental care evolve when the benefit of additional care is higher than the cost. Maximizing lifetime reproductive success with lesser cost is the ultimate reproductive goal of both sexes. So neither of the sexes will show care if the loss outweigh the benefit. Parents show reduced care in the condition when parental care cannot improve the survival of their offspring. Biparental care evolve when both male and female achieve the maximum reproductive success through the care.

=Biparental Care and Mate Guarding in Humans=

Biparental care can be defined as parental behavior (by both male and female) which has positive outcomes on the offspring’s survival, fitness and wellbeing. Increasing the survival and wellbeing of the offspring thus increases the reproductive fitness of the offspring. Increasing the reproductive fitness of an offspring maximizes the chance of the genes of parents to pass down to the future generation. Humans are often involve in biparental care, unlike most mammals, female and male form relatively long lasting pair-bonding and both of them participate in raising their offspring. Parental care involves parental investment in which parents face trade-off between investments of the current reproduction and future reproduction. Parental investment is parental care.

Long lasting parental care is distinctive to humans, which starts from gestation period and continues till the offspring become mature or in some circumstances even after the offspring become a parent. This prolonged parental care in the extended childhood is expensive. Thus raising a child single handed can be difficult especially during lactation period, which is very crucial in assuring the survival of the newborn. Because human females give birth to comparatively underdeveloped baby as result of bi-pedalism (upright walking) and the neonate completely depends on the care from parents to grow and develop outside of the mother’s womb. Nursing is a critical period which requires the mother's intensive care and father's provision. Breastfeeding women spent less time working outside compared to women who are not nursing. Support from their mate could increase the survival of the offspring.

=Hypothesis of Biparental care and Mating= Biparental care evolved because it helps to accomplishes the maximum life time reproductive success. In the past human evolution, women risked the consequence of sex and invested enormously on their offspring unaccompanied. Because maternal investment is expensive women need to check the potential of the partner before mating. Evolution favored women who were selective in choosing their mate. Women choose a man who is able and willing to invest on her and her children, protect her and her children, show promises as a good parent and good man for alliance without expensive cost. This implies that females' choice made males to get in to biparental care .However there are arguments claiming the other way around.

Mate guarding hypothesis
For male paternal care is selected as byproduct of mate guarding. Many authors argue that male may end up providing parental care while protecting mate against harassment from other males. Male reproductive fitness depend on his decision of parental investment and pair bonding. His decision to care for children depends on his options to enhance his fitness. Males abandon caring for their children if it does not enhance their fitness more than the option of having extra mate. Maximum reproductive success is the ultimate goal of human life strategy. So Individuals should act in a way which maximizes their reproductive success. Biparental care increases reproductive success and it requires stable conjugal union. Conjugal relationships will be stable where parenting effort is more beneficiary than mating effort. Conjugal stability can be determined by various factors in mate guarding.

Mate guarding refers strategies intended to preserve access to mate while protecting mate from intrasexual rivals and preventing mate from defecting the relationship. Mate guarding in humans evolved for two reasons:-

1.	‘Mate poachers’ often attempt to distract an already mated individuals for short term affair or permanent mating.

2.	Mates can also want to defect or leave for a better life Strategies of mate guarding evolved to solve these problems.

Cost of failure in mate guarding
If a man fails in mate guarding then this could result in genetic cuckoldry. This happens when a wife is fertilized by another man. Besides the loss of genetic reproduction, a man can invest years in a child who is not biologically related to him. This may bring social problem of having bad reputation and make to become vulnerable to further mate poachers. Failure in mate guarding can also result in permanent defection of man’s partner. This also result in losing the entire access to future reproductive value of the mate, the maternal effort she would have put in raising his children. She can also disseminate bad information about the man’s strength, weakness which can be used as an advantage by intrasexual rivals.

Regardless of partner's infidelity a woman always knows her children. Internal fertilization guarantees the woman about her own children. But when she fails in mate guarding, she will lose resources that a man spends in his extra marital affair. A woman who failed to guard also risks STI. In permanent loss of partner a woman loses a lot of resource which could be used in her and her children. As a result, both male and female developed strategies for mate guarding

Jealousy
Jealousy Is psychological strategy in mate guarding. It is activated whenever there is a threat to relationships. Because Sexual infidelity causes paternity uncertainty, sexual jealousy and mate guarding should be easily triggered by men. Men become more distressed by sexual infidelity than women. Man’s infidelity can also risk the women in loss of man’s parenting, time, attention, investment and commitment. A woman should focus on the signals of these loses. People get emotionally involved with whom they often have sex with but not always. However emotional infidelity make women more distressed

Mate guarding and error management theory
In reading the minds of one there are two ways of wrong judgments. One can infer a sexual interest when it is actually absent or one can become oblivious about the sexual interest displayed by the partner’s behavior. Error management theory is about the cost-benefit consequences of mind reading in mate guarding. ‘Error Management Theory predicts that evolved mind-reading mechanisms will be biased to produce more of one type of inferential error than another. In the context of jealousy and mate guarding, it is reasonable to hypothesize that it would be more costly for a person to err by failing to detect a partner’s infidelity than to erroneously infer an infidelity that has not occurred’.

Provision hypothesis
Infants’ helplessness put the mother in need of help. Infants need parental care to survive and it is the mother who is the immediate care giver. Mothers breastfeed their infants which is the ultimate source of nutrition and immunoactive substances for the baby. The low fat and protein composition of breast milk demands frequent feeding to the infant which is engaging and makes the mother to be around and close to the baby more than any other person. Since breast milk is the only diet for the baby mothers are the primary care givers more than fathers in all cultures .Paternal care in humans was selected by the need for male provisioning especially during lactation or gestation periods.Male can provide care either directly by caring for the child or by helping the mother with the necessary resource and freeing her to care for the child.

=Sexual division of subsistence labor and biparental care= Sexual division of subsistence labor contributes for conjugal stability which enhances biparental care. cross cultural studies show, When women contribute the majority of subsistence then there is unstable conjugal relation. This reduces the biparental care for their offspring. When the male provides the majority of the subsistence the chance for conjugal stability is higher. When both of the parents contribute equally there is relatively stable conjugal union. . =Alloparenting and biparental care= In a culture where alloparenting (care by individuals other than the parents) is involved in child rearing, there is lesser need of father’s provision and lesser cost of paternal abandonment. in such cultures there is conjugal instability and less paternal provision. However,it is not clearly known that whether alloparenting is creating this instability or not.

=Mating types and parental care= Monogamy- a male mates with one female and often increases paternal certainty. Monogamy increases biparental care. Polygyny a male mates with several female. polygyny exhibits mostly only female care. Polyandry single female mates with several males and this increases paternal uncertainty and the female or both male and female can do the parental care. Promiscuity both male and female mate with several individual, either sex can care for the offspring.

=Reference=