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The article discusses the evolution of flexible parenting. Topics include parental behaviors that are highly responsive to changes in environment, such as the provisioning of food for offspring, how such changes affect the ways in which parenting is adapted and evolves in response to environmental variation, the diversity of parental care in animals and the impact of social and non-social environmental factors, and the use of behavioral reaction norms (BRNs) to describe individual plasticity.

The article explores the concept of altruism in the context of unpredictable environments. It presents new theoretical insights suggesting that altruistic acts can evolve to reduce variance in the reproductive success of relatives, known as "altruistic bet-hedging." It states that the study on white-browed sparrow-weavers finds that altruistic helping reduces reproductive variance without significantly affecting average reproductive success.