Female Infanticide?

The strategy for male rodents is to kill any young they can up until the point that they mate. Then they no longer kill. The reason is that there is a 100% chance before mating that the offspring are not theirs.By Hamiltons Rule, since relatedness is nearly equal to zero, the benefit must also be near to zero as well. On average a male rodent will benefit by this tactic to pass their genes onto the next generation. Inclusive fitness dictates that the selfish genes will work the percentages from the standpoint of relatedness. I don't think it makes any difference whether the offspring are female or not. Female hyenas will kill off their litter mates in order to dominate their cohort.In humans, the practice of female infanticide is not uncommon, but this is mostly due to socio-economic reasons. Infanticide is most common with young women with low access to resources. In Victorian England there was a rash of impoverished women "accidentally" rolling over their babies in their sleep. So a law was passed that forbade women from sleeping with their babies to prevent "accidental" deaths to the babies. Ever since, Anglo-American women sleep separately from the babies.------------------
Bringer of fire, trickster, teacher.

quote:

---

Again, right. However, almost any socio-economic reason for any behavior has a natural analog. I can think of few, if any, human group behaviors that don't - including religion . The analog is what I'm reaching for here. I'm actually surprised that the theists haven't jumped on this already. Aftr all, if it can be shown that maternal infanticide has no natural equivalent or adaptive explanation, then there's a tiny bit of additional weight to their argument that humans are "special" - not simply different. Admittedly a kind of gruesome argument in this case.

---

It would be Trivers parent/child conflict theory. This occurs because a child "shares" 100% of its genes with itself and the mother only 50%. The child wants as much of the resources from the mother as possible, while the mother seeks to limit that investment in order to have something for her other children. So a child born to a mother while she has another that is not yet weaned, is more likely to be killed or neglected by the mother. Female infanticide occurs in some societies because males provide more of the calories and thus ensure the contributions of food to their kin more than a female would. An example of this is the Ache in Paraguay.You should consider that the strategy for an R-selected organism like a rodent will be quite a bit different from a K-selected like a human.------------------
Bringer of fire, trickster, teacher.