ArticleRoyal Society open science2016
Parents face quantity-quality trade-offs between reproduction and investment in offspring in Iceland.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 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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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.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 21 citations in OpenAlex.
- Diagnosing confounded Bateman gradients.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2025Article
- The long-lasting legacy of reproduction: lifetime reproductive success shapes expected genetic contributions of humans after 10 generations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Church attendance and alloparenting: an analysis of fertility, social support and child development among English mothers.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Child volunteers in a women's paramilitary organization in World War II have accelerated reproductive schedules.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Article
- The Reproductive Ecology of Industrial Societies, Part I : Why Measuring Fertility Matters.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2016Article
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
How to optimally allocate time, energy and investment in an effort to maximize one's reproductive success is a fundamental problem faced by all organisms. This effort is complicated when the production of each additional offspring dilutes the total resources available for parental investment. Although a quantity-quality trade-off between producing and investing in offspring has long been assumed in evolutionary biology, testing it directly in humans is difficult, partly owing to the long generation time of our species. Using data from an Icelandic genealogy (Íslendingabók) over two centuries, I address this issue and analyse the quantity-quality trade-off in humans. I demonstrate that the primary impact of parents on the fitness of their children is the result of resources and or investment, but not genes. This effect changes significantly across time, in response to environmental conditions. Overall, increasing reproduction has negative fitness consequences on offspring, such that each additional sibling reduces an individual's average lifespan and lifetime reproductive success. This analysis provides insights into the evolutionary conflict between producing and investing in children while also shedding light on some of the causes of the demographic transition.
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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.