Cambridge Reading Group on Reproduction: Professor Rebecca Kilner

For our Easter Term Reading Group we are pleased to welcome Professor Rebecca Kilner, Professor of Zoology. 

Research in my group focuses on the relationship between social behaviour and evolution. With experiments in the field and the laboratory, we have derived novel general insights into the evolution of social behaviour and demonstrated how social behaviour can, in turn, affect evolution.

Sign up for this Reading Group

Sex-specific parent-offspring conflict

Reading:
Furness, AI and Pollux, BJA 2025
Sex-specific parent-offspring conflict in humans
Quarterly Review of Biology 100:257-306 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/738781 

Introduction

Disputes between parents and their young might seem easy enough to spot in everyday life, but the notion of a general, evolutionary conflict between offspring and their parents has had a surprisingly slippery history. Nevertheless, over five decades since the concept was first proposed by Trivers, the concept of parent-offspring conflict has theoretically robust foundations and there is diverse evidence from a wide range of species that it is a significant selective force in nature. Some of the clearest evidence for the existence of this conflict comes from interactions in utero between mammalian mothers and their offspring  - an area covered by this paper too. The novel angle presented here is to consider whether or not the intensity of parent-offspring conflict differs between the sexes, and whether there is any evidence that it continues after birth. The evidence is drawn from humans, and so has implications for understanding human health and behaviour within families, but the ideas could apply to any animal - giving us rich scope for a lively discussion.

 

Sign up for this Reading Group