ArticleCurrent biology : CB2013
The demographic transition influences variance in fitness and selection on height and BMI in rural Gambia.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- The evolutionary puzzle of cognition: challenges and insights from individual-based studies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Grandmother effects over the Finnish demographic transition.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- The prevalence and influencing factors of coexisting prediabetes and prehypertension among Bangladeshi adults.BMC public health · 2023Article
- The transition to modernity and chronic disease: mismatch and natural selection.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2018Review
- Cohort Profile: The Kiang West Longitudinal Population Study (KWLPS)-a platform for integrated research and health care provision in rural Gambia.International journal of epidemiology · 2017Article
- The Reproductive Ecology of Industrial Societies, Part II : The Association between Wealth and Fertility.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2016Article
- When genes and environment disagree: Making sense of trends in recent human evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- Genetic evidence for natural selection in humans in the contemporary United States.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- Understanding variation in human fertility: what can we learn from evolutionary demography?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- How does variance in fertility change over the demographic transition?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Reduced costs of reproduction in females mediate a shift from a male-biased to a female-biased lifespan in humans.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Article
- Anthropometric geography applied to the analysis of socioeconomic disparities: cohort trends and spatial patterns of height and robustness in 20Population, space and place · 2015Article
- Do the Low WHRs and BMIs Judged Most Attractive Indicate Higher Fertility?Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Recent human history is marked by demographic transitions characterized by declines in mortality and fertility. By influencing the variance in those fitness components, demographic transitions can affect selection on other traits. Parallel to changes in selection triggered by demography per se, relationships between fitness and anthropometric traits are also expected to change due to modification of the environment. Here we explore for the first time these two main evolutionary consequences of demographic transitions using a unique data set containing survival, fertility, and anthropometric data for thousands of women in rural Gambia from 1956-2010. We show how the demographic transition influenced directional selection on height and body mass index (BMI). We observed a change in selection for both traits mediated by variation in fertility: selection initially favored short females with high BMI values but shifted across the demographic transition to favor tall females with low BMI values. We demonstrate that these differences resulted both from changes in fitness variance that shape the strength of selection and from shifts in selective pressures triggered by environmental changes. These results suggest that demographic and environmental trends encountered by current human populations worldwide are likely to modify, but not stop, natural selection in humans.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.