This morning, I was awakened by a full sized juvenile towhee begging from its parents. It was creating a terrible ruckus. Begging is a common conflict between parents and offspring. It is costly in terms of time, energy, predation risk, etc. Another popular view is that there is a fundamental conflict between culture and biology.
Babies are initially selfish and greedy.
They must be socialized in order to become full members of the culture. In this course, we will take an evolutionary perspective. Parental efforts generally serve to maximize an individual adult's lifetime reproductive success and not necessarily each reproductive event. They must decide how to allocate the available resources among their offspring. This can lead to conflicts of interest both between the parents and their offspring as well as between siblings.