ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
The cultural evolution of fertility decline.
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 38 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 119 citations in OpenAlex.
- Evaluation of the Risk of Birth Defects Related to the Use of Assisted Reproductive Technology: An Updated Systematic Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Pooled it
- Trial
- The Communication Issue in Developing Childcare Services for Children Under Three Years of Age in China: An Analysis of Policy Texts and Practical Cases.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Two universal pathways in demographic transition.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Unveiling Mexico's Demographic Transitions.Studies in family planning · 2025Article
- Female friendship and the cultural transmission of low-fertility values: Evidence from rural Poland.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Income and Sex Moderate the Association Between Population Density and Reproduction: A Multilevel Analysis of Life History Strategies Across 23 Nations.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Global fertility in 204 countries and territories, 1950-2021, with forecasts to 2100: a comprehensive demographic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021.Lancet (London, England) · 2024Article
- The Global Decline in Human Fertility: The Post-Transition Trap Hypothesis.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Sexual conflict over sex-an underappreciated consequence of childbirth?Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Article
- From the Ground Up: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Past Fertility and Population Narratives.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Adoption, Fostering, and Parental Absence in Vanuatu.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Gendered conflict in the human family.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Review
- Life-history tradeoffs in a historical population (1896-1939) undergoing rapid fertility decline: Costs of reproduction?Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Proxyeconomics, a theory and model of proxy-based competition and cultural evolution.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Evoked and transmitted culture models: Using bayesian methods to infer the evolution of cultural traits in history.PloS one · 2022Article
- A Double-Track Pathway to Fast Strategy in Humans and Its Personality Correlates.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Ecology of the Anthropocene signals hope for consciously managing the planetary ecosystem.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Cultural extinction in evolutionary perspective.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cultural evolutionists have long been interested in the problem of why fertility declines as populations develop. By outlining plausible mechanistic links between individual decision-making, information flow in populations and competition between groups, models of cultural evolution offer a novel and powerful approach for integrating multiple levels of explanation of fertility transitions. However, only a modest number of models have been published. Their assumptions often differ from those in other evolutionary approaches to social behaviour, but their empirical predictions are often similar. Here I offer the first overview of cultural evolutionary research on demographic transition, critically compare it with approaches taken by other evolutionary researchers, identify gaps and overlaps, and highlight parallel debates in demography. I suggest that researchers divide their labour between three distinct phases of fertility decline--the origin, spread and maintenance of low fertility--each of which may be driven by different causal processes, at different scales, requiring different theoretical and empirical tools. A comparative, multi-level and mechanistic framework is essential for elucidating both the evolved aspects of our psychology that govern reproductive decision-making, and the social, ecological and cultural contingencies that precipitate and sustain fertility decline.
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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.