Male-female conflict and parent-offspring conflict

Although the male competition half of sexual selection theory is now widely applied in plant studies, there is still little agreement on female choice in plants. One of the main reasons is that plants probably have relatively little opportunity to choose males directly. Choice is more likely to be exerted on traits of postpollination entities such as pollen tubes, endosperms, or embryos, which seems to place the interactions into the realm of parent-offspring relations rather than sexual selection. Nevertheless, these two kinds of interactions have much in common; they have similar underlying causes and at least sometimes lead to similar results. Moreover, if genomic imprinting (differential expression of alleles inherited from the mother and father) turns out to be common, parent-offspring conflicts will often turn out to be a special case of male-female conflicts. These similarities suggest that it may indeed be useful to try to apply theory and methods from one area to the other. A new method is described for investigating the history and resolution of both male-female conflict and parent-offspring conflict. -Author