<story><title>Macaques at Japan reserve get first alpha female in 70-year history</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/03/macaques-at-japan-reserve-get-first-alpha-female-in-70-year-history</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lkrubner</author><text>We should expect to see this throughout the world, as the climate crisis intensifies. We should expect to see this especially in intelligent or social species. Game theory predicts that, from the point of view of parents, when the population is expanding it is better to have sons and when the population is shrinking it is better to have daughters. A son might have a lot of children when times are good and zero children when times are bad. A daughter is likely to always have some children, and therefore is a safer bet when things are bad. This shifts the incentives for parents. When population is falling, parents have an incentive to care less about their sons, and to invest more resources in their daughters.&lt;p&gt;That much is known.&lt;p&gt;We can also speculate that if daughters are now receiving more investment as children, they are better positioned to go higher in society as they become adults. A general shift in political power, throughout social species, should be expected, as the climate crisis threatens more and more species with extinction.&lt;p&gt;This might extent to even those species in zoos, as their population usually is not allowed to expand.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Blikkentrekker</author><text>This like most evolutionary psychology seems like one of those “anything goes” explanations that simply seems like a plausible explanation, but can just as easily be offered to explain falsehoods.&lt;p&gt;The problem with it is that one can invent a scenario that never happened and asked for an explanation and similar such plausible explanations can be proffered for it, but there&amp;#x27;s really no way to actually verify and test them.&lt;p&gt;It can just as easily be explained with “&lt;i&gt;It is a simple fluke that will repeat itself in another 70 years.&lt;/i&gt;”.</text></comment>
<story><title>Macaques at Japan reserve get first alpha female in 70-year history</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/03/macaques-at-japan-reserve-get-first-alpha-female-in-70-year-history</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lkrubner</author><text>We should expect to see this throughout the world, as the climate crisis intensifies. We should expect to see this especially in intelligent or social species. Game theory predicts that, from the point of view of parents, when the population is expanding it is better to have sons and when the population is shrinking it is better to have daughters. A son might have a lot of children when times are good and zero children when times are bad. A daughter is likely to always have some children, and therefore is a safer bet when things are bad. This shifts the incentives for parents. When population is falling, parents have an incentive to care less about their sons, and to invest more resources in their daughters.&lt;p&gt;That much is known.&lt;p&gt;We can also speculate that if daughters are now receiving more investment as children, they are better positioned to go higher in society as they become adults. A general shift in political power, throughout social species, should be expected, as the climate crisis threatens more and more species with extinction.&lt;p&gt;This might extent to even those species in zoos, as their population usually is not allowed to expand.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whatshisface</author><text>That makes no sense to me because for every child a daughter has, someone&amp;#x27;s son had a child. It has to balance out unless someone invents monkey mitosis.</text></comment>