Many organisms nourish and care for their
offspring, boosting the offspring's reproductive potential.
trivers1972 recognized that such parental investment, when
made differentially across the sexes,
could explain the existence of
sexually dimorphic behaviour. However, parental investment in nature
is difficult to measure, and explanations involving parental
investment are hard to verify. Here we use an ALife simulation to
investigate the effect of explicit, numerical parental investments on
two reproductive strategies of interest -- consensual mating and
rape.
With some preliminary empirical results, we demonstrate the
potential of an ALife approach to evolutionary psychology.