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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences logoLink to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
. 2002 Mar 29;357(1419):341–350. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2001.0931

Relating paternity to paternal care.

Ben C Sheldon 1
PMCID: PMC1692948  PMID: 11958702

Abstract

Intuition suggests, to most people, that parents should be selected to care for their offspring in relation to how certain they are of being the parents of those offspring. Theoretical models of the relationship between parental investment and certainty of parentage predict the two to be related only when some other assumptions are made, few of which can be taken for granted. I briefly review the models and their assumptions, and discuss two kinds of difficulty facing an empiricist wishing to test the models. The first is the problem of unmeasured (and immeasurable) variables. The second is the problem that even the most extensive models do not capture the complexity that can be demonstrated in real systems. I illustrate some of these problems, and some qualitative tests of the models, with experimental work on a population of the collared flycatcher. My conclusion is that although there are some cases where the models have qualitative support, we are a long way from understanding whether paternal care is commonly adjusted in relation to certainty of paternity.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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