Székely Tamás
Department of Biology & Biochemistry, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, United Kingdom.
Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol. 2014 Sep 25;6(11):a017665. doi: 10.1101/cshperspect.a017665.
Parental care is an immensely variable social behavior, and sexual conflict offers a powerful paradigm to understand this diversity. Conflict over care (usually considered as a type of postzygotic sexual conflict) is common, because the evolutionary interests of male and female parents are rarely identical. I investigate how sexual conflict over care may facilitate the emergence and maintenance of diverse parenting strategies and argue that researchers should combine two fundamental concepts in social behavior to understand care patterns: cooperation and conflict. Behavioral evidence of conflict over care is well established, studies have estimated specific fitness implications of conflict for males or females, and experiments have investigated specific components of conflict. However, studies are long overdue to reveal the full implications of conflict for both males and females. Manipulating (or harming) the opposite sex seems less common in postzygotic conflicts than in prezygotic conflicts because by manipulating, coercing, or harming the opposite sex, the reproductive interest of the actor is also reduced. Parental care is a complex trait, although few studies have yet considered the implications of multidimensionality for parental conflict. Future research in parental conflict will benefit from understanding the behavioral interactions between male and female parents (e.g., negotiation, learning, and coercion), the genetic and neurogenomic bases of parental behavior, and the influence of social environment on parental strategies. Empirical studies are needed to put sexual conflict in a population context and reveal feedback between mate choice, pair bonds and parenting strategies, and their demographic consequences for the population such as mortalities and sex ratios. Taken together, sexual conflict offers a fascinating avenue for understanding the causes and consequences of parenting behavior, sex roles, and breeding system evolution.
亲代抚育是一种极具变异性的社会行为，而性冲突为理解这种多样性提供了一个有力的范式。抚育方面的冲突（通常被视为一种合子后性冲突）很常见，因为雄性和雌性亲代的进化利益很少相同。我研究了抚育方面的性冲突如何促进多样化养育策略的出现和维持，并认为研究人员应结合社会行为中的两个基本概念来理解抚育模式：合作与冲突。抚育冲突的行为证据已得到充分证实，已有研究估计了冲突对雄性或雌性的特定适合度影响，并且实验也对冲突的特定组成部分进行了研究。然而，揭示冲突对雄性和雌性的全面影响的研究早就该进行了。在合子后冲突中，操纵（或伤害）异性的情况似乎比在合子前冲突中少见，因为通过操纵、胁迫或伤害异性，行为者的生殖利益也会降低。亲代抚育是一个复杂的性状，尽管很少有研究考虑多维性对亲代冲突的影响。未来关于亲代冲突的研究将受益于理解雄性和雌性亲代之间的行为相互作用（例如谈判、学习和胁迫）、亲代行为的遗传和神经基因组基础，以及社会环境对亲代策略的影响。需要进行实证研究，将性冲突置于种群背景中，揭示配偶选择、配偶关系和养育策略之间的反馈，以及它们对种群的人口统计学后果，如死亡率和性别比例。综上所述，性冲突为理解养育行为、性别角色和繁殖系统进化的原因及后果提供了一条引人入胜的途径。
