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A new study has revealed that incestuous parents benefit evolutionarily when they invest more of their resources in each of their offspring than non-incestuous parents do. The authors show mathematically that because the offspring of incestuous matings are both more closely related to their parents and more likely to suffer reduced viability, natural selection is predicted to cause incestuous parents to invest more resources in each offspring but consequently to produce relatively few offspring. These results synthesise previous evolutionary theory and predict novel patterns of behaviour, encompassing parental care, inbreeding tolerance and avoidance, and evolutionary conflict among family members.