Word: speciesism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Some years later, Trivers reasoned that if Hamilton was right about the social insects, worker ants would spend three times the energy rearing sisters as rearing brothers, because the workers are three times more closely related to their sisters than to their brothers. Trivers and his associate, Hope Hare, then...
Still, there are problems in explaining all altruism as a direct investment in one's own genes. For example, some birds give warning cries for the flock even when their young and close relatives are absent. Trivers proposed a solution in a 1971 paper on reciprocal altruism that has become...
Indeed, to sociobiologists deceit is a crucial factor in evolution. Some birds, like the nighthawk, can feign a broken wing to lure predators away from a nest. In some avian species, a female that has been inseminated by a departed male may try to hide the fact, thus tricking a...
But in most species, including humans, the female has no such advantage. Men have far more chances to play the reproduction game: each male can start thousands of pregnancies; each female can start a maximum of about 30. More important, the female must invest far more heavily in each pregnancy...
Why, in the vast majority of species, does the male aggressively pursue the female, instead of the other way round? According to Sociobiologist Robert Trivers, the sex that invests more is a "limiting resource." In other words, because women do most of the work to bring children into the world...