Using our metaphor of the individual animal as a survival machine behaving as if it had the purpose of preserving its genes, we can talk about a conflict between parents and young, a battle of the generations. The battle is a subtle one, and no holds are barred on either side. A child will lose no opportunity of cheating. It will pretend to be hungrier than it is, perhaps younger than it is, more in danger than it really is. It is too small and weak to bully its parents physically, but it uses every psychological weapon at its disposal: lying, cheating, deceiving, exploiting, right up to the point where it starts to penalize its relatives more than its genetic relatedness to them should allow. Parents, on the other hand, must be alert to cheating and deceiving, and must try not to be fooled by it. This might seem an easy task. If the parent knows that its child is likely to lie about how hungry it is, it might employ the tactic of feeding it a fixed amount and no more, even though the child goes on screaming. One trouble with this is that the child may not have been lying, and if it dies as a result of not being fed the parent would have lost some of its precious genes. Wild birds can die after being starved for only a few hours. A. Zahavi has suggested a particularly diabolical form of child blackmail: the child screams in such a way as to attract predators deliberately to the nest. The child is saying Fox, fox, come and get me. The only way the parent can stop it screaming is to feed it. So the child gains more than its fair share of food, but at a cost of some risk to itself. The principle of this ruthless tactic is the same as that of the hijacker threatening to blow up an aeroplane, with himself on board, unless he is given a ransom. I am sceptical about whether it could ever be favoured in evolution, not because it is too ruthless, but because I doubt if it could ever pay the blackmailing baby. He has too much to lose if a predator really came. This is clear for an only child, which is the case Zahavi himself considers. No matter how much his mother may already have invested in him, he should still value his own life more than his mother values it, since she has only half of his genes. Moreover, the tactic would not pay even if the blackmailer was one of a clutch of vulnerable babies, all in the nest together, since the blackmailer has a 50 per cent genetic stake in each of his endangered brothers and sisters, as well as a 100 per cent stake in himself. I suppose the theory might conceivably work if the predominant predator had the habit of only taking the largest nestling from a nest. Then it might pay a smaller one to use the threat of summoning a predator, since it would not be greatly endangering itself. - Richard Dawkins - The selfish gene
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 19:55:57 +0000
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