Section of Ecology, Department of Biology, University of Turku, Turku 20014, Finland.
Biol Lett. 2013 Feb 27;9(2):20130034. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2013.0034. Print 2013 Apr 23.
A bias in reproduction towards sons, which are energetically more costly than daughters, has been suggested to shorten parental lifespan, but previous results have been mixed. Reproductive costs should be most evident in low rather than high resource settings, and are not expected to be severe in men, because women pay higher direct costs of reproduction. We, therefore, used demographic data from pre-industrial Finland to investigate whether the number of sons and daughters born affected their parents' post-reproductive survival and whether this was related to parent's resource availability. Irrespective of access to resources, mothers, but not fathers, with many sons suffered from reduced post-reproductive survival, and this association decreased as mothers aged. Our results provide evidence that Finnish mothers traded long post-reproductive lifespan for giving birth to many sons.
有一种观点认为，人类生育男孩的倾向性（男孩的生育成本比女孩更高）会缩短父母的寿命，但之前的研究结果并不一致。在资源匮乏的环境中，生育成本应该更为显著，而在男性中则不会很严重，因为女性需要承担更高的生育直接成本。因此，我们利用来自前工业化时期芬兰的人口统计数据，调查了父母生育的子女数量是否会影响其生育后的生存状况，以及这种影响是否与父母的资源获取能力有关。无论资源获取情况如何，生育较多儿子的母亲，而不是父亲，在生育后生存时间会缩短，而且这种关联随着母亲年龄的增长而减弱。我们的研究结果表明，芬兰母亲为了生育较多的儿子，牺牲了较长的生育后寿命。
