| Popis: |
This chapter examines how men’s reproductive strategies impact their children’s lives. In the first section, I will review Darwinian theory on mating and parenting, asking how we should expect men to spend their time and energy given the options open to them. In the next section, “Nineteenth-century Utah Mormons,” I will describe a sample of men’s reproductive histories that contains both men who had several wives and men who had only one wife. I will then examine aspects of their children’s life histories (fertility, survivorship, marriages, divorces, and widowhood) to discern the effects of their fathers’ investment. I will finish with “Fathering as a Reproductive Strategy,” discussing monogamy and polygyny as reproductive strategies and how they affect the way men invest as fathers. In this sample, fathers with few resources seem to have invested more in their children’s survival, whereas fathers with more resources helped their children marry. To see the logic behind this, we need to look at fathering not as a given, but as merely one component of men’s reproductive strategies (Clutton-Brock, 1991). |
