Marriage Systems, Evolution of

Fortunato, Laura

doi:10.1016/b978-0-08-097086-8.81059-4

Cited by 15 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…As evolutionary reasoning penetrated the human sciences, researchers began to argue that human strategies in mating and marriage are a product of sexual selection consistent with the Darwinian–Bateman paradigm (e.g. [45]). Indeed, men generally show higher variance in fitness and number of mates (or spouses) than do women (reviewed in Brown et al .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unpacking mating success and testing Bateman’s principles in a human population

Mulder

Ross

2019

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Human marriage systems, characterized by long-term partnerships and extended windows of parental care, differ from the mating systems of pulsed or seasonally breeding non-human animals in which Bateman’s principles were originally tested. These features, paradigmatic of but not unique to humans, complicate the accurate measurement of mating success in evaluating Bateman’s three principles. Here, we unpack the concept of mating success into distinct components: number of partners, number of years partnered, the timing of partnerships, and the quality of partners. Drawing on longitudinal records of marriage and reproduction collected in a natural-fertility East African population over a 20-year period, we test and compare various models of the relationship between mating success and reproductive success (RS), and show that an accurate assessment of male and female reproductive behaviour requires consideration of all major components of mating success. Furthermore, we demonstrate that while Bateman’s third principle holds when mating success is defined in terms of years married, women’s fitness increases whereas men’s fitness decreases from an increase in the number of marriage partners, holding constant the total effective duration of marriages. We discuss these findings in terms of the distinct, sex-specific pathways through which RS can be optimized, and comment on the contribution of this approach to the broader study of sexual selection.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unpacking mating success and testing Bateman’s principles in a human population

Mulder

Ross

2019

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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“…19 The same criticism applies to analyses that disregard heterogeneity among women: under female heterogeneity, a man faces a quantity-quality trade-off, which may induce him to prefer monogamous to polygynous marriage. Such heterogeneity may be traced to differences in productivity (Grossbard, 1980), in human capital (Gould et al, 2008), in degree of faithfulness (Fortunato andArchetti, 2010, Gavrilets, 2012), or in the amount of wealth the woman brings to the household with her dowry (Goody, 1976).…”

Section: Heterogeneity Among Men and Among Womenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of the Family: Theory and Implications for Economics

Alger¹,

Cox²

2019

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance

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Which parent can be expected to be more altruistic toward their child, the mother or father? All else equal, can we expect older generation members to be more solicitous of younger family members or vice versa? Policy interventions often target recipients by demographic status: more money being put in the hands of mothers, say, or transfers of income from young to old via public pensions. Economics makes predictions about pecuniary incentives and behavior but tends to be agnostic about how, say, a post-menopausal grandmother might behave, just because she is a post-menopausal grandmother. Evolutionary theory fills this gap by analyzing how preferences of family members emerge from the Darwinian exigencies of “survive and reproduce.” Coin of the realm is so-called “inclusive fitness,” reproductive success of oneself plus that of relatives, weighted by closeness of the relationship. Appending basic biological traits onto considerations of inclusive fitness generates predictions about preferences of family members. A post-menopausal grandmother with a daughter just starting a family is predicted to care more about her daughter than the daughter cares about her, for example. Evolutionary theory predicts that mothers tend to be more altruistic toward children than fathers, and that close relatives would be inclined to provide more support to one another than distant relatives. An original case study is provided, which explains the puzzle of diverging marriage rates by education in terms of heterogeneity in preferences for commitment. Economists are justifiably loathe to invoke preferences to explain trends, since preference-based explanations can be concocted to explain just about anything. But the evolutionary approach does not permit just any invocation of preferences. The dictates of “survive and reproduce” sharply circumscribe the kinds of preference-related arguments that are admissible.

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“…[ 2 ]) or social norms (e.g. [ 3 ]). These population-level patterns are the aggregate product of underlying individual strategies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inferring individual-level processes from population-level patterns in cultural evolution

2017

Self Cite

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Our species is characterized by a great degree of cultural variation, both within and between populations. Understanding how group-level patterns of culture emerge from individual-level behaviour is a long-standing question in the biological and social sciences. We develop a simulation model capturing demographic and cultural dynamics relevant to human cultural evolution, focusing on the interface between population-level patterns and individual-level processes. The model tracks the distribution of variants of cultural traits across individuals in a population over time, conditioned on different pathways for the transmission of information between individuals. From these data, we obtain theoretical expectations for a range of statistics commonly used to capture population-level characteristics (e.g. the degree of cultural diversity). Consistent with previous theoretical work, our results show that the patterns observed at the level of groups are rooted in the interplay between the transmission pathways and the age structure of the population. We also explore whether, and under what conditions, the different pathways can be distinguished based on their group-level signatures, in an effort to establish theoretical limits to inference. Our results show that the temporal dynamic of cultural change over time retains a stronger signature than the cultural composition of the population at a specific point in time. Overall, the results suggest a shift in focus from identifying the one individual-level process that likely produced the observed data to excluding those that likely did not. We conclude by discussing the implications for empirical studies of human cultural evolution.

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Marriage Systems, Evolution of

Cited by 15 publications

References 35 publications

Unpacking mating success and testing Bateman’s principles in a human population

Unpacking mating success and testing Bateman’s principles in a human population

Evolution of the Family: Theory and Implications for Economics

Inferring individual-level processes from population-level patterns in cultural evolution

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