ArticleHuman nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.)2016
The Reproductive Ecology of Industrial Societies, Part I : Why Measuring Fertility Matters.
Article in Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.), 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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.
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.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- A matter of time: Bateman's principles and mating success as count and duration across social strata in contemporary Finland.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- 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
- Development of Fertility, Social Status, and Social Trust of Farmers.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Hired helpers at the nest: The association between life-cycle servants and net fertility in North Orkney, 1851-1911.American journal of physical anthropology · 2020Article
- Disentangling wealth effects on fertility in 64 low- and middle-income countries.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Differences between sons and daughters in the intergenerational transmission of wealth.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- The expendable male hypothesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, 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
- Local environmental quality positively predicts breastfeeding in the UK's Millennium Cohort Study.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2017Article
- The Reproductive Ecology of Industrial Societies, Part II : The Association between Wealth and Fertility.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2016Article
- Modernizing Evolutionary Anthropology : Introduction to the Special Issue.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
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Is fertility relevant to evolutionary analyses conducted in modern industrial societies? This question has been the subject of a highly contentious debate, beginning in the late 1980s and continuing to this day. Researchers in both evolutionary and social sciences have argued that the measurement of fitness-related traits (e.g., fertility) offers little insight into evolutionary processes, on the grounds that modern industrial environments differ so greatly from those of our ancestral past that our behavior can no longer be expected to be adaptive. In contrast, we argue that fertility measurements in industrial society are essential for a complete evolutionary analysis: in particular, such data can provide evidence for any putative adaptive mismatch between ancestral environments and those of the present day, and they can provide insight into the selection pressures currently operating on contemporary populations. Having made this positive case, we then go on to discuss some challenges of fertility-related analyses among industrialized populations, particularly those that involve large-scale databases. These include "researcher degrees of freedom" (i.e., the choices made about which variables to analyze and how) and the different biases that may exist in such data. Despite these concerns, large datasets from multiple populations represent an excellent opportunity to test evolutionary hypotheses in great detail, enriching the evolutionary understanding of human behavior.
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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.