ArticleEvolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society2014
The marginal valuation of fertility.
Article in Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Population decline: where demography, social science, and biology intersect.Reproduction (Cambridge, England) · 2024Review
- The Global Decline in Human Fertility: The Post-Transition Trap Hypothesis.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Post-marital residence patterns and the timing of reproduction: evidence from a matrilineal society.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Contributions of evolutionary anthropology to understanding climate-induced human migration.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2021Review
- Cultural change beyond adoption dynamics: Evolutionary approaches to the discontinuation of contraception.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
- Fitness-maximizers employ pessimistic probability weighting for decisions under risk.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Sharing the Load: How Do Coresident Children Influence the Allocation of Work and Schooling in Northwestern Tanzania?Demography · 2019Article
- Evolutionary demography of age at last birth: integrating approaches from human behavioural ecology and cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- The Reproductive Ecology of Industrial Societies, Part I : Why Measuring Fertility Matters.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2016Article
- Modernizing Evolutionary Anthropology : Introduction to the Special Issue.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 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
- Does Sexual Conflict between Mother and Father Lead to Fertility Decline? : A Questionnaire Survey in a Modern Developed Society.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2016Article
- Parents face quantity-quality trade-offs between reproduction and investment in offspring in Iceland.Royal Society open science · 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
- Why do women stop reproducing before menopause? A life-history approach to age at last birth.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- Measuring selection in human populations using the growth rate per generation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Measuring selective constraint on fertility in human life histories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Substantial theoretical and empirical evidence demonstrates that fertility entails economic, physiological, and demographic trade-offs. The existence of trade-offs suggests that fitness should be maximized by an intermediate level of fertility, but this hypothesis has not had much support in the human life-history literature. We suggest that the difficulty of finding intermediate optima may be a function of the way fitness is calculated. Evolutionary analyses of human behavior typically use lifetime reproductive success as their fitness criterion. This fitness measure implicitly assumes that women are indifferent to the timing of reproduction and that they are risk-neutral in their reproductive decision-making. In this paper, we offer an alternative, easily-calculated fitness measure that accounts for differences in reproductive timing and yields clear preferences in the face of risky reproductive decision-making. Using historical demographic data from a genealogically-detailed dataset from 19th century Utah, we show that this measure is highly concave with respect to reproductive effort. This result has three major implications: (1) if births are properly timed, a lower-fertility reproductive strategy can have the same fitness as a high-fertility strategy, (2) intermediate optima are far more likely using fitness measures that are strongly concave with respect to effort, (3) we expect mothers to have strong investment preferences with respect to the risk inherent in reproduction.
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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.