ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Sex roles and the evolution of parental care specialization.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 45 citations in OpenAlex.
- Asymmetrical Parental Investment Across Breeding Stages in the Globally Endangered Egyptian Vulture (Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Flexible parental care in a songbird correlates with sex-specific responses to seasonal phenology, mating opportunity and reproductive success.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Adult Sex Ratio as a Demographic Feedback Linking Mating Systems, Parental Care, and Evolution.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Review
- The evolution of division of labour: preconditions and evolutionary feedback.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Experience and trust: the benefits of mate familiarity are realized through sex-specific specialization of parental roles in Cassin's auklet.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Sexual selection and life history interact to influence the evolution of paternal care.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Selection on the joint actions of pairs leads to divergent adaptation and coadaptation of care-giving parents during pre-hatching care.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Navigating sex and sex roles: deciphering sex-biased gene expression in a species with sex-role reversal (Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Article
- Sex differences in avian parental care patterns vary across the breeding cycle.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Pandemic Leadership: Sex Differences and Their Evolutionary-Developmental Origins.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Sexual Dimorphism in Language, and the Gender Shift Hypothesis of Homosexuality.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Adaptation to monogamy influences parental care but not mating behavior in the burying beetle,Ecology and evolution · 2020Article
- Biological constraints and socioecological influences on women's pursuit of risk and the sexual division of labour.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Males and females are defined by the relative size of their gametes (anisogamy), but secondary sexual dimorphism in fertilization, parental investment and mating competition is widespread and often remarkably stable over evolutionary timescales. Recent theory has clarified the causal connections between anisogamy and the most prevalent differences between the sexes, but deviations from these patterns remain poorly understood. Here, we study how sex differences in parental investment and mating competition coevolve with parental care specialization. Parental investment often consists of two or more distinct activities (e.g. provisioning and defence) and parents may care more efficiently by specializing in a subset of these activities. Our model predicts that efficient care specialization broadens the conditions under which biparental investment can evolve in lineages that historically had uniparental care. Major transitions in sex roles (e.g. from female-biased care with strong male mating competition to male-biased care with strong female competition) can arise following ecologically induced changes in the costs or benefits of different care types, or in the sex ratio at maturation. Our model provides a clear evolutionary mechanism for sex-role transitions, but also predicts that such transitions should be rare. It consequently contributes towards explaining widespread phylogenetic inertia in parenting and mating systems.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.