Throughout history and in societies all over the world, parents have tried to

influence the love lives of their children with mixed success. Parents and children
frequenly dont see eye to eye on what makes a suitable partner. Whenever a
pattern of human behaviour is widespread, there is reason to suspect that it
might have something to do with our evolutionary history.
But how could evolution have led to such an awkward situation as parent-child
conflict over mates? In a recent paper in the journal evolution and human
behavior, the Biologist Franjo Weissing and the social psychologist Bram Buunk,
showed how it could work. When thinking about mate choice, the natural starting
point is the theory of sexual selection. This theory, which focuses not on the
struggle for existence but on the competition to attract sexual partners, has
been hugely successful in explaining the diverse courtship behaviors and mating
patterns in the animal kingdom.
Modern mathematical versions of his theory show how female mating
preferences and male charctateristics will evolve together. But when you try to
apply the theory to humans, you hit a snag. In humans, there is an extra
preference involved: that of the parents. At first sight, it might seem surprising
that parents and their children should evolve to have any conflict at all. After all,
they share many of the same genes. Shouldnt their preferences be perfectly
aligned?
Well, no not completely. Parents each pass on half their genes to each of their
children, so from a genetic point of view all children are equally valuable to
them. It is in parentsm evolutionary interests to distribute their resources
money, support, etc. in such a way that leads to as many surviving grand
children as possible, regardless of which of their children provide them. Children,
by contrast, have a stronger genetic interest in their own reproduction than in
that of their siblings, so each child should try to secure more than his or her fair
share of parental resources. It is this conflict over parental resources that can
lead to a conflict over mate choice.
In the study, a computer model is built to simulate the evolutionary process. A
large virtual population of males and females are generated, paired up, and
mated. They produce offspring, who inherited (with a small chance of mutation)
the investing qualities and mating preferences of their parents. The model is run
over thousands of generations, observing which genetic traits thrived and which
didnt.
Evolutionary bilogists had built this kind of model before to understand mating
preferences in other animals, but weissing and Buunk added some new
ingredients. First, they allowed a females parents to interfere with her choice of
a male. Second, they allowed parents to distribute their resources among their
children. They found that overtime, parents in their model evolved to invest
more resources in daughters who chose mates with few resources. This unequal
investment was in the parents best interests, because a daughter with an
unsupportive partner would profit more from extra help than her more fortunate
sisters. By helping their needier daughters, parents maximized their total

number of surviving grand children. But this unequal investment created an

incentive for daughters to exploit their parents generosity by choosing a
partner who was less supportive. As a result, the choosinessof females gradually
declined over evolutionary time. To counterbalance this, the parental preference
for caring son-in-law increased. Hence the conflict.
It does not mean that the preson we choose as a partner comes down entirely to
our genes. Cultural factors, personal development and chance events
presumably have a far greater influence. But given the precvalence of matechoice conflict, it seems likely that evolution has played an important role.
People have been stealing, betraying others and committing murder for ages. In
fact, humans have never succeeded in eradicating crime, although according to
the rational choice theory in economics this should be possible in principle.
The teory states that humans turn criminal if it is worhwhile. Stealing or evading
taxes, for instance, pays offif the prospects of unlawful gains outwigh the
excpected punishment. Therefore, if a state sets the penalties high enough and
ensures that lawbreakers are brought to justice, it should be possible to eliminate
crime completely
This theory is largely oversimplified, says Dirk Helbing, a professor of sociology.
The USA, for example, often has far more drastic penalties than Eruropean
countries. Still, despite the death penalty in some America states, the homicide
rate in the USA is five times higher than in Western Europe. Furthermore, ten
times more people sit in American prisons than in many European countries.
More repression, however, can sometimes even lead to more crime, says
Helbing. Ever since the USA declared the war on terror around the globe, the
number of terrorist attack worldwide has increased, not fallen. The classic
approach. Where criminals merely need to be pursued and punished more
strictly to curb crime, often does not work. Nonetheless, this approach
dominates the public discussion. In order to better understand the origins of
crime. Helbing and his colleauges have developed a new so-called agent-based
model that takes the network of social interactions into account and is more
realistic than previous models. Not only does it include criminals and law
enforcers, like many previous models, but also honest citizens as a third group.
Parameters such as the penalties size and prosecution costs can be varied in the
model. Moreover, it also considers spatial dependencies. The representatives of
the three groups do not interact with another randomly, but only if they
encounter each other in space and time. In particular, individual agents imitate
the behavior of agents from other groups, if this is promosing
Using the model, the scientists were able to demostrate that tougher punishment
do not necessarily lead to less crime and, if so, then at least not to the extent the
punishment effort is increased. The researchers were also able to stimulate how
crime can suddenly break out and calmdown again. Like the piig cycle from the
economic sciences or the predator-prey cycles from ecology, crime is cyclical as
well. This explains observations made, for instance, in the USA: according to the
FBIs Uniform CrimeReporting Program, cyclical changes in the frequency of

criminal offences can be found in several American states if a state increases

the investments in its punitive system to an extend that is no longer costeffective, politicians will cut the law enforcement budget. Says Helbing. As a
result , there is more room for crime to spread again.
However, would there be a different way of combating crime, if not repression?
According to Helbing , the focus should be on the socio-economic context since
the environemnt plays a pivotal role in the behavior of individuals. The majority
of criminal acts have a social background, claims Helbing. For example, if an
individual feels that all the friends and neighbors are cheating the state, he will
inevitably wonder whether he should be the last honest person to fill in the tax
declaration correctly.

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