The Truth About Cinderella: Part II

If you haven't already, you'll want to read Part I of this series.

The first thing I'll say is that I had to wade through a lot of scientific jargon on evolution, Darwinism, natural selection, etc, which wasn't all that interesting to me. My eyes would glaze over in all the lengthy discussions of animal stepparent behavior...what can I say, infanticidal lions really aren't my thing.

I did find one interesting point on pages 18-19, which references an earlier work:

"Another [observation] was a paper published in Science in 1975 by ornithologist Harry Power, who maintained that one should not expect birds who become the replacement mates of widowed parents to help feed their predecessor's offspring. Power's presumption was that natural selection weeds out those who are willing to help raise others' young, because insofar as the basis of such 'altruism' is heritable, step-parental investment contributes to the replication and proliferation of the genes of rivals rather than the replication and proliferation of genes conducive to the development of the altruism." 

Got that? In other words, stepmom birds who invest in their stepbirds (instead of focusing on having their own biological birdkids) are allowing other female birds to "win" because they procreate more, thus proliferating their own genes. So even though such a stepmom bird might be altruistic in her care of her stepbirds, she's not passing on an altruism gene by doing so, therefore (at least in terms of natural selection), her efforts are wasted.

If that's not a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't", I don't know what is.

Stay tuned for Part III tomorrow.