Writing Trivers’s 1972 Theory of Parental Investment and Sexual Selection

Abstract A brief summary of the most wide-ranging paper of mine, covering the evolution of sex differences in all species. Especially novel is the application to differential mortality by sex, which varies widely across species and higher taxa. The paper provided a framework, anchored in sexual selection and parental investment, for discovering and explaining many sex differences in human mating strategies. The paper has become one of the most widely cited publications in evolutionary biology, accruing more than 17,000 scientific citations as of the year 2022. It is also one of the most widely cited papers in the mushrooming field of evolutionary psychology.