ArticleNature communications2022
Mothers with higher twinning propensity had lower fertility in pre-industrial Europe.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 4 papers.
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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
4 citing papers in PubMed, 8 citations in OpenAlex.
- Age- and sex-dependent associations between the number of older siblings and early-life survival in pre-industrial humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Maternal capacity, twinning and fertility: the last birth matters.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Reply to: Maternal capacity, twinning and fertility: the last birth matters.Nature communications · 2024Article
- A gene-culture co-evolutionary perspective on the puzzle of human twinship.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
14 authors at 9 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Historically, mothers producing twins gave birth, on average, more often than non-twinners. This observation has been interpreted as twinners having higher intrinsic fertility - a tendency to conceive easily irrespective of age and other factors - which has shaped both hypotheses about why twinning persists and varies across populations, and the design of medical studies on female fertility. Here we show in >20k pre-industrial European mothers that this interpretation results from an ecological fallacy: twinners had more births not due to higher intrinsic fertility, but because mothers that gave birth more accumulated more opportunities to produce twins. Controlling for variation in the exposure to the risk of twinning reveals that mothers with higher twinning propensity - a physiological predisposition to producing twins - had fewer births, and when twin mortality was high, fewer offspring reaching adulthood. Twinning rates may thus be driven by variation in its mortality costs, rather than variation in intrinsic fertility.
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