ABSTRACT
As Robert Trivers pointed out (1974), individual infants may attempt to extract greater investment from their parents than the parents have been selected to give. Herein lies the source of the chronic tension between parental commitment to the survival and well being of offspring and parental frustration at the frequency and insistence of infant demands. Although a primate infant should rarely seek to extract more reproductive effort from a mother than is compatible with her survival, it might well seek to extract additional parental investment when it would come at the expense of future siblings, rather than the mother's survival. In this paper I will be dealing with maternal dilemmas and decision making at two levels: 1) at the level of reproductive effort - her own survival versus that of her progeny; and 2) at the level of parental investment - investment in one particular infant versus investment in offspring of another sex, born with different qualities and/or under different circumstances.
