Parental investment, mate desertion and a fallacy¶
Dawkins, R., & Carlisle, T. R. (1976). Parental investment, mate desertion and a fallacy. Nature, 262(5564), 131-133.
Cited by¶
1 citation across 1 artifact.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Sunk Cost and Irreversible Commitment
- The difference is crucial: irreversibility is about the possibility of return; sunk costs are about the psychological weight of past commitment, a confusion Dawkins and Carlisle (1976) named the "Concorde fallacy" in their critique of past-investment reasoning in evolutionary biology and beyond.
This sourceNames the "Concorde fallacy"—the error of treating past investment as a reason to continue—and distinguishes it from genuine irreversibility; foundational cross-domain critique of sunk-cost reasoning.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
The abstract supports that the paper critiques an application of parental-investment reasoning, but it does not mention the 'Concorde fallacy' or the irreversibility/sunk-cost distinction.
“But one of his most appealing usages of it is fallacious.”
- The difference is crucial: irreversibility is about the possibility of return; sunk costs are about the psychological weight of past commitment, a confusion Dawkins and Carlisle (1976) named the "Concorde fallacy" in their critique of past-investment reasoning in evolutionary biology and beyond.
Verification¶
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Registry ID ref:993b86766b2d · see in the full table