The Reproductive Ecology of Industrial Societies, Part I

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.

The behavioural constellation of deprivation: Causes and consequences

“…Cultural success can be measured as the production of relevant resources that meet basic needs (e.g., food security) and improve well-being. Key resources can be measured in many cases as "wealth"income and assets (Stulp et al 2016)although there are multiple possibilities for the differential value of "wealth types" (e.g., Mattison 2011) and for less-monetized measures of cultural success (Borgerhoff Mulder et al 2009;Macfarlan et al 2012;. Measuring perception of relevant resources is a key empirical advancement for cross-cultural comparison that is relevant to human life history and BCD.…”

Support for new mothers and fertility in the United Kingdom: Not all support is equal in the decision to have a second child

“…This, along with an expansion in the types of potential support which can be provided in such societies (beyond help with subsistence tasks, which has the focus of study in small-scale societies), means that the analysis of how support influences fertility is much more complex in high-income societies, and requires careful operationalisation. Such societies are also large and heterogeneous, so it is important to consider whether such heterogeneity influences either the availability of support, or relationships between support and fertility (Stulp, Sear, & Barrett, 2016).…”

“…These contrasting associations between childcare and probability of birth in different studies could therefore reflect the way in which support is measured. Such contrasting associations highlight that researchers need to clearly specify how support is measured, to facilitate comparisons with similar studies (see Stulp et al 2016 for further discussion of this).…”

Modernizing Evolutionary Anthropology

“…The issue that we address here is not novel. Indeed, there has been a longstanding debate between some psychologists (EP for short) and anthropologists (usually now referred to as human behavioral ecologists, or HBEers) who use an evolutionary approach to understand human behavior, based in part on divergent a priori expectations that contemporary behavior may be (HBE) or is not likely to be (EP) adaptive (e.g., Smith 2000;Stulp, Sear, and Barrett 2016, this issue). This difference of opinion was also a major component of an earlier debate between sociobiologists and Gouldian biologists (e.g., Gould and Lewontin 1979) that has continued to divide anthropologists (see also Sear 2016a) focused more strongly on the possible adaptive value of behavior versus privileging other explanations for human biology and behavior, respectively.…”