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

infuence the love lives o their children with mixed success. Parents and children

requenly dont see eye to eye on what makes a suitable partner. henever a

pattern o human behaviour is widespread, there is reason to suspect that it

might have something to do with our evolutionary history.

!ut how could evolution have led to such an awkward situation as parent"child

confict over mates# $n a recent paper in the %ournal evolution and human

behavior, the !iologist &ran%o eissing and the social psychologist !ram !uunk,

showed how it could work. hen thinking about mate choice, the natural starting

point is the theory o sexual selection. This theory, which ocuses not on the

struggle or existence but on the competition to attract sexual partners, has

been hugely successul in explaining the diverse courtship behaviors and mating

patterns in the animal kingdom.

'odern mathematical versions o his theory show how emale mating

preerences and male charctateristics will evolve together. !ut when you try to

apply the theory to humans, you hit a snag. $n humans, there is an extra

preerence involved( that o the parents. )t *rst sight, it might seem surprising

that parents and their children should evolve to have any confict at all. )ter all,

they share many o the same genes. +houldnt their preerences be perectly

aligned#

ell, no not completely. Parents each pass on hal their genes to each o their

children, so rom a genetic point o view all children are equally valuable to

them. $t is in parentsm evolutionary interests to distribute their resources

money, support, etc. in such a way that leads to as many surviving grandchildren as possible, regardless o which o their children provide them. -hildren,

by contrast, have a stronger genetic interest in their own reproduction than in

that o their siblings, so each child should try to secure more than his or her air

share o parental resources. $t is this confict over parental resources that can

lead to a confict over mate choice.

$n the study, a computer model is built to simulate the evolutionary process. )

large virtual population o males and emales are generated, paired up, and

mated. They produce ospring, who inherited /with a small chance o mutation0

the investing qualities and mating preerences o their parents. The model is runover thousands o generations, observing which genetic traits thrived and which

didnt.

1volutionary bilogists had built this kind o model beore to understand mating

preerences in other animals, but weissing and !uunk added some new

ingredients. &irst, they allowed a emales parents to interere with her choice o

a male. +econd, they allowed parents to distribute their resources among their

children. They ound that overtime, parents in their model evolved to invest

more resources in daughters who chose mates with ew resources. This unequal

investment was in the parents best interests, because a daughter with an

unsupportive partner would pro*t more rom extra help than her more ortunatesisters. !y helping their needier daughters, parents maximi2ed their total

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number o surviving grand children. !ut this unequal investment created an

incentive or daughters to 3exploit4 their parents generosity by choosing a

partner who was less supportive. )s a result, the choosinesso emales gradually

declined over evolutionary time. To counterbalance this, the parental preerence

or caring son"in"law increased. 5ence the confict.

$t does not mean that the preson we choose as a partner comes down entirely to

our genes. -ultural actors, personal development and chance events

presumably have a ar greater infuence. !ut given the precvalence o mate"

choice confict, it seems likely that evolution has played an important role.

People have been stealing, betraying others and committing murder or ages. $n

act, 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 i it is worhwhile. +tealing or evading

taxes, or instance, pays o6 the prospects o unlawul gains outwigh the

excpected punishment. Thereore, i a state sets the penalties high enough and

ensures that lawbreakers are brought to %ustice, it should be possible to eliminate

crime completely

This theory is largely oversimpli*ed, says 7irk 5elbing, a proessor o sociology.

The 8+), or example, oten has ar more drastic penalties than 1ruropean

countries. +till, despite the death penalty in some )merica states, the homicide

rate in the 8+) is *ve times higher than in estern 1urope. &urthermore, ten

times more people sit in )merican prisons than in many 1uropean countries.

'ore repression, however, can sometimes even lead to more crime, says

5elbing. 1ver since the 8+) declared the 3war on terror4 around the globe, thenumber o terrorist attack worldwide has increased, not allen. 3The classic

approach. here criminals merely need to be pursued and punished more

strictly to curb crime, oten does not work. 39onetheless, this approach

dominates the public discussion. $n order to better understand the origins o

crime. 5elbing and his colleauges have developed a new so"called agent"based

model that takes the network o social interactions into account and is more

realistic than previous models. 9ot only does it include criminals and law

enorcers, like many previous models, but also honest citi2ens as a third group.

Parameters such as the penalties si2e and prosecution costs can be varied in the

model. 'oreover, it also considers spatial dependencies. The representatives othe three groups do not interact with another randomly, but only i they

encounter each other in space and time. $n particular, individual agents imitate

the behavior o agents rom other groups, i this is promosing

8sing the model, the scientists were able to demostrate that tougher punishment

do not necessarily lead to less crime and, i so, then at least not to the extent the

punishment eort is increased. The researchers were also able to stimulate how

crime can suddenly break out and calmdown again. :ike the piig cycle rom the

economic sciences or the predator"prey cycles rom ecology, crime is cyclical as

well. This explains observations made, or instance, in the 8+)( according to the

&!$s 8niorm -rime;eporting Program, cyclical changes in the requency o

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criminal oences can be ound in several )merican states 3i a state increases

the investments in its punitive system to an extend that is no longer cost"

eective, politicians will cut the law enorcement budget.4 +ays 5elbing.4 )s a

result , there is more room or crime to spread again.4

5owever, would there be a dierent way o combating crime, i not repression#)ccording to 5elbing , the ocus should be on the socio"economic context since

the environemnt plays a pivotal role in the behavior o individuals. The ma%ority

o criminal acts have a social background, claims 5elbing. &or example, i an

individual eels that all the riends and neighbors are cheating the state, he will

inevitably wonder whether he should be the last honest person to *ll in the tax

declaration correctly.

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