ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
How does variance in fertility change over the demographic transition?
Article 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 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Biological Consequences of Declining Human Fertility.Public health challenges · 2026Article
- Unveiling Mexico's Demographic Transitions.Studies in family planning · 2025Article
- Socioeconomic status and sex ratio in the contemporary Hungarian population.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Fertility intentions and outcomes in Indonesia: Evolutionary perspectives on sexual conflict.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Disentangling wealth effects on fertility in 64 low- and middle-income countries.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Nicotinamide as Independent Variable for Intelligence, Fertility, and Health: Origin of Human Creative Explosions?International journal of tryptophan research : IJTR · 2019Review
- Material wealth in 3D: Mapping multiple paths to prosperity in low- and middle- income countries.PloS one · 2017Article
- The Reproductive Ecology of Industrial Societies, Part II : The Association between Wealth and Fertility.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 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
- Wealth, fertility and adaptive behaviour in industrial populations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- Status competition, inequality, and fertility: implications for the demographic transition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- The offspring quantity-quality trade-off and human fertility variation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Most work on the human fertility transition has focused on declines in mean fertility. However, understanding changes in the variance of reproductive outcomes can be equally important for evolutionary questions about the heritability of fertility, individual determinants of fertility and changing patterns of reproductive skew. Here, we document how variance in completed fertility among women (45-49 years) differs across 200 surveys in 72 low- to middle-income countries where fertility transitions are currently in progress at various stages. Nearly all (91%) of samples exhibit variance consistent with a Poisson process of fertility, which places systematic, and often severe, theoretical upper bounds on the proportion of variance that can be attributed to individual differences. In contrast to the pattern of total variance, these upper bounds increase from high- to mid-fertility samples, then decline again as samples move from mid to low fertility. Notably, the lowest fertility samples often deviate from a Poisson process. This suggests that as populations move to low fertility their reproduction shifts from a rate-based process to a focus on an ideal number of children. We discuss the implications of these findings for predicting completed fertility from individual-level variables.
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