ABSTRACT
Non-human animals often find themselves caring "parentally" for young who are not their own progeny. Many such cases represent instances of "brood parasitism" in which the mechanisms of discriminating own from alien young have been circumvented, whether by conspecifics (Rohwer and Freeman, 1989) or by parasitic specialists like the European cuckoo
social role" argument has not been articulated in an evolutionarily sophisticated form. An implicit premise of the conceptual framework of its proponents is that social influences and expectations impact upon all roles and relationships in qualitatively similar ways, so that the characterization of the essential distinguishing features of, say, peer versus mating versus filial versus sibling relationships and their respective psychologies is not even part of the analytic agenda. Reconciling this implicit premise that all relationships are essentially alike with elementary principles of social evolution would be difficult if not impossible, but the social scientists who adhere to this premise have not perceived the problems facing their domain-general conception of sociality, let alone confronted them.)
Of course, the fact that the novel social role argument is non-Darwinian does not mean it must be wrong. But even in its own terms, this popular analysis is ahistorical, ethnocentric, and counterfactual. Stepparenthood is not a novel circumstance. The mortality levels incurred by tribal hunter-gatherers guarantee that remarriage and stepparenthood have been common for as long as people have formed marital bonds with biparental care; moreover, the ethnographies of recent and contemporary hunter-gatherers abound with anecdotal information on both the prevalence of steprelationships and their predictable conflicts {e.g. Shostak, 1981; Hill and Kaplan, 1988). Nor is stepparenthood even newly prevalent in "our society". Historical records indicate that stepparental relationships, consequent upon both widowhood and divorce, have been numerous for centuries in the western world {e.g. Dupâquier et al, 1981). Moreover, European historical archives show that having a stepparent was associated with mortality risk in fact and not just in fairy tale (Voland, 1988).
