ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Wealth, fertility and adaptive behaviour in industrial populations.
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 24 papers.
What it found
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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
24 citing papers in PubMed, 61 citations in OpenAlex.
- Trial
- Trial
- Unveiling Mexico's Demographic Transitions.Studies in family planning · 2025Article
- Impact of energy availability and physical activity on variation in fertility across human populations.Journal of physiological anthropology · 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
- Can impulsivity evolve in response to childhood environmental harshness?Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Weighted Bayesian Poisson Regression for The Number of Children Ever Born per Woman in Bangladesh.Journal of statistical theory and applications : JSTA · 2022Article
- Association of undernutrition and female infertility in East Africa: Finding from multi-country demographic and health surveys.Frontiers in global women's health · 2022Article
- Why the Son-bias in Caregiving? Testing Sex-differences in the Associations Between Paternal Caregiving and Child Outcomes in England.Journal of family issues · 2021Article
- Socioeconomic determinants of cumulative fertility in Ghana.PloS one · 2021Article
- Do Criminals Live Faster Than Soldiers and Firefighters? : A Comparison of Biodemographic and Psychosocial Dimensions of Life History Theory.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2020Article
- When does family size matter? Sibship size, socioeconomic status and education in England.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Disentangling wealth effects on fertility in 64 low- and middle-income countries.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Morphometric traits predict educational attainment independently of socioeconomic background.BMC public health · 2019Article
- Sex Differences in the Association of Family and Personal Income and Wealth with Fertility in the United States.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2019Article
- Cognitive ability and fertility among Swedish men born 1951-1967: evidence from military conscription registers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Nicotinamide's Ups and Downs: Consequences for Fertility, Development, Longevity and Diseases of Poverty and Affluence.International journal of tryptophan research : IJTR · 2018Article
- The Reproductive Ecology of Industrial Societies, Part II : The Association between Wealth and Fertility.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2016Article
- The Reproductive Ecology of Industrial Societies, Part I : Why Measuring Fertility Matters.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2016Article
- The offspring quantity-quality trade-off and human fertility variation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The lack of association between wealth and fertility in contemporary industrialized populations has often been used to question the value of an evolutionary perspective on human behaviour. Here, we first present the history of this debate, and the evolutionary explanations for why wealth and fertility (the number of children) are decoupled in modern industrial settings. We suggest that the nature of the relationship between wealth and fertility remains an open question because of the multi-faceted nature of wealth, and because existing cross-sectional studies are ambiguous with respect to how material wealth and fertility are linked. A literature review of longitudinal studies on wealth and fertility shows that the majority of these report positive effects of wealth, although levels of fertility seem to fall below those that would maximize fitness. We emphasize that reproductive decision-making reflects a complex interplay between individual and societal factors that resists simple evolutionary interpretation, and highlight the role of economic insecurity in fertility decisions. We conclude by discussing whether the wealth-fertility relationship can inform us about the adaptiveness of modern fertility behaviour, and argue against simplistic claims regarding maladaptive behaviour in humans.
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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.