ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Understanding variation in human fertility: what can we learn from evolutionary demography?
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 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
28 citing papers in PubMed, 108 citations in OpenAlex.
- Two universal pathways in demographic transition.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Unveiling Mexico's Demographic Transitions.Studies in family planning · 2025Article
- Indirect genetic effects among neighbors promote cooperation and accelerate adaptation in a small-scale human society.Science advances · 2025Article
- Life Course Timing of Mortality Exposure and Fertility Behavior.Population research and policy review · 2025Article
- The functional ovarian anatomy of 492 women aged 18-22 years: a population-based study in Norway.Human reproduction open · 2025Article
- Participants reporting greater desire to have children demonstrate weaker preferences for younger adult faces.PloS one · 2025Article
- Effects of a traditionally preparedFrontiers in nutrition · 2025Article
- Stratified Fertility: Age Norms, Ideals, Behaviors, and the Role of National Contexts.European journal of population = Revue europeenne de demographie · 2024Article
- Precocious puberty under stressful conditions: new understanding and insights from the lessons learnt from international adoptions and the COVID-19 pandemic.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2023Review
- Linkages between men's wealth status and the ideal number of children: A trend and multilevel analysis of survey data in Nigeria.PLOS global public health · 2023Article
- Fertility rates in women with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Wisconsin Medicaid.Disability and health journal · 2022Article
- Life-history tradeoffs in a historical population (1896-1939) undergoing rapid fertility decline: Costs of reproduction?Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Evoked and transmitted culture models: Using bayesian methods to infer the evolution of cultural traits in history.PloS one · 2022Article
- Explaining the pattern of childbearing behaviors in couples: Protocol for a focused ethnographic study.Journal of education and health promotion · 2022Article
- Fitness and Power: The Contribution of Genetics to the History of Differential Reproduction.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior · 2021Article
- Machine learning for sperm selection.Nature reviews. Urology · 2021Review
- Guards! Guards! How innate lymphoid cells ensure local law and order.Biomedical journal · 2021Article
- Extrinsic and Existential Mortality Risk in Reproductive Decision-Making: Examining the Effects of COVID-19 Experience and Climate Change Beliefs.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Does Parental Investment Shape Adult Children's Fertility Intentions? Findings From a German Family Panel.Frontiers in sociology · 2021Article
- Cultural change beyond adoption dynamics: Evolutionary approaches to the discontinuation of contraception.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Decades of research on human fertility has presented a clear picture of how fertility varies, including its dramatic decline over the last two centuries in most parts of the world. Why fertility varies, both between and within populations, is not nearly so well understood. Fertility is a complex phenomenon, partly physiologically and partly behaviourally determined, thus an interdisciplinary approach is required to understand it. Evolutionary demographers have focused on human fertility since the 1980s. The first wave of evolutionary demographic research made major theoretical and empirical advances, investigating variation in fertility primarily in terms of fitness maximization. Research focused particularly on variation within high-fertility populations and small-scale subsistence societies and also yielded a number of hypotheses for why fitness maximization seems to break down as fertility declines during the demographic transition. A second wave of evolutionary demography research on fertility is now underway, paying much more attention to the cultural and psychological mechanisms underpinning fertility. It is also engaging with the complex, multi-causal nature of fertility variation, and with understanding fertility in complex modern and transitioning societies. Here, we summarize the history of evolutionary demographic work on human fertility, describe the current state of the field, and suggest future directions.
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.