There are many sacrifices that have to be done in order to ensure other things. For example it can be said that if you want to excel in a class you may have to sacrifice a bit of your sports practice and social time. I think of it as a balance. You have certain time to spend in your day to distribute it between the things you want to do. If you add a more weight to the academic side then you have to take some from social life or other activities. The point where you want to be is to achieve a balance between hobbies, school, and social life that is good for you. In the gene world there are things that are very similar. When you are a parent you also have a similar balance. If you use your parental investment to please your kids then you are taking time from you to help them survive. Sacrifices are the things that you stop doing to help and please others. These are sacrifices because the time you used to use doing things that you wanted now is used on helping others survive essentially doing altruistic actions. According to Dawkins: "This means that, if a woman had a child and a grandchild born on the same day, the grandchild could expect to live longer than the child" (pg.126). What I understand with this is that as the "survival machine" gets older then the probabilities of the children to grow decrease. In this situation we are also presented with the sacrifice and decision on which thing to spend time on. If the mother had chosen to have another baby then it would mean that she wouldn't be so attentive of her grandchild because she would be caring about her child. In this case the grandchild will be lacking a grandmother because she is concentrated on other things. Since as they grow older the chances that the child survives are less normally, what the grandmother will do is ensure the survival of her genes by focusing on her grandchild. In human life there are cases where the grandmother cares for them a lot. The parents are the ones that are in charge of teaching us and correcting us but our grandparents have another role. They serve more like the ones that take care of us and spoil us because they are not the ones that generally scold us.
There are many cases where the sacrifices do not exists even between brothers and sisters. I am talking specifically in the animal kingdom where the competition for resources is much fiercer than in humans. In humans we sometimes see cases of jealousy from the kids towards the parents when they have another baby. When a new baby comes it is sometimes not so well received by the previous brother. Since it is a baby it needs much more attention so the balance of parental attention is shifted towards the newborn. What will normally happen is that the older kid will try to get the attention of his parents by doing things. For example he might start to act in impolite ways to attract attention. In The Selfish Gene there is a quotation that says "But in the light of our selfish gene concept we must expect that individuals will cheat, will tell lies about how hungry they are" (pg.130). When I read this part I was impressed of how selfish will the genes get to ensure their survival. I simply can't imagine myself lying that I am not hungry when I am full. The rest of my family is hungry and I will be taking food from them if I lie, but that is what happens in the animal kingdom. There is certain limit of the abuse of lies. Since brothers share half of their genes with each other they will also want them to survive. If the animal sees that he is decreasing a lot the survival chances of his brother he will stop lying, but if not he will keep on lying. When parents choose to which kid they will give the food they have to balance the percentages out to see which one needs the food more to survive. Since there are many that can be lying then it is really hard for the parents to find out. Essentially animals sometimes will sacrifice themselves and their time for other and in other occasions they will not sacrifice anything. I think there are no emotions linked to these animal acts, just the selfish genes wanting to survive.
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