Social and biological determinants of reproductive success in Swedish males and females born 1915–1929

Goodman, Anna; Koupil, Ilona

doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2009.03.007

Cited by 50 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…An alternative approach towards uncovering the complexity of factors affecting fitness lies in investigating the means, whereby various wealth types influence subsequent outcomes. For example, a remarkable dataset that provides social and biological variables at birth for a Swedish cohort born between 1915 and 1925 Goodman & Koupil [16] shows how biological (embodied) factors operate through social pathways. The advantage of such an analysis is that it allows clear specification of how, in the Swedish case, biological factors (such as birth weight) influence fitness through social processes (such as marriage), or alternatively how material factors (such as wealth) might influence embodied outcomes (such as weight or height) that subsequently affect fitness.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the nature of wealth and its effects on human fitness

Mulder

Beheim

2011

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Studying fitness consequences of variable behavioural, physiological and cognitive traits in contemporary populations constitutes the specific contribution of human behavioural ecology to the study of human diversity. Yet, despite 30 years of evolutionary anthropological interest in the determinants of fitness, there exist few principled investigations of the diverse sources of wealth that might reveal selective forces during recent human history. To develop a more holistic understanding of how selection shapes human phenotypic traits, be these transmitted by genetic or cultural means, we expand the conventional focus on associations between socioeconomic status and fitness to three distinct types of wealth-embodied, material and relational. Using a model selection approach to the study of women's success in raising offspring in an African horticultural population (the Tanzanian Pimbwe), we find that the top performing models consistently include relational and material wealth, with embodied wealth as a less reliable predictor. Specifically, child mortality risk is increased with few household assets, parent nonresidency, child legitimacy, and one or more parents having been accused of witchcraft. The use of multiple models to test various hypotheses greatly facilitates systematic comparative analyses of human behavioural diversity in wealth accrual and investment across different kinds of societies.Keywords: fitness; child mortality; wealth; Pimbwe; human behavioural ecology; multi-model inference INTRODUCTIONBiologists strive to understand natural selection in wild populations in order to understand variability in traits within and between populations and species. Evolutionary social science embraces similar aims, recognizing that cultural [1], ecological [2] and material [3] transmission supplement genetic transmission in contributing to trait distributions. The specific contribution of human behavioural ecology to understanding the role of natural selection in human populations lies in determining the consequences for genetic fitness of specific behavioural, physiological and cognitive traits, and in exploring the adaptive flexibility of humans across traditional and modern contexts [4,5]. Though human behavioural ecology (aka evolutionary anthropology) cannot easily demonstrate evidence of genetically transmitted adaptations [6], it offers a useful and perhaps unique naturalistic window through which we can study the operation of selection in natural populations [7]. To understand the operation of natural selection in human populations, evolutionary anthropologists have, for several decades, studied the sources of fitness variation, aiming to specify the phenotypic traits on which

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the nature of wealth and its effects on human fitness

Mulder

Beheim

2011

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…In this cohort, we have previously demonstrated that social and biological characteristics at birth predict school performance and entrance to higher education (Unpublished data under submission: A. Goodman, M. D. Gisselmann, I. Koupil). We have also previously shown that characteristics at birth and higher education both predict subsequent marriage and reproductive success 33 . In this paper we therefore address the following research questions: 1) Is school performance associated with subsequent marriage and/or reproductive success (completed number of children and grandchildren)?…”

Section: Hypotheses and Research Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of school performance upon marriage and long-term reproductive success in 10,000 Swedish males and females born 1915–1929

Goodman

Koupil

2010

Evolution and Human Behavior

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Goodman, A; Koupil, I (2010) The effect of school performance upon marriage and long-term reproductive success in 10,000 Swedish males and females born 1915-1929. Evolution and human behavior , 31 (6 AbstractHumans are an exceptionally intelligent species, and the selective pressures which may have shaped these advanced cognitive powers are therefore of interest. This study investigates the fitness consequences of pre-reproductive school performance in a Swedish population-based cohort of 5244 males and 4863 females born [1915][1916][1917][1918][1919][1920][1921][1922][1923][1924][1925][1926][1927][1928][1929]. School performance was measured at around age 10 using three variables: mean schoolmarks; being promoted/held back in school; and recognised learning difficulties. Our primary outcomes were probability of ever marrying, total number of children and total number of grandchildren. In males (but not females), poorer school performance predicted fewer children and grandchildren. This was primarily mediated via probability of marriage; mortality and fertility within marriage were not important mediating pathways. The effect of school performance upon marriage in males was independent of early-life social and biological characteristics, including birthweight for gestational age, preterm birth, family composition and family socio-economic position. The effect of school performance upon the probability of marriage in males was, however, largely mediated by adult socioeconomic position. This suggests that in general sexual selection for cognitive abilities per se did not play a major role in either males or females in this cohort. Adult socio-economic position did not, however, fully explain the marriage disadvantage in males or (at marginal significance) females with particularly poor school performance. We conclude that school performance can affect long-term reproductive success. In this population, however, the effect is confined to males and is largely mediated by the increased probability of marriage which comes with their greater socio-economic success.

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“…The low levels of fertility found in post-demographic transition societies appear to be maladaptive, occurring as they do alongside radical increases in material wealth, nutrition, and modern healthcare, which should allow parents to raise larger families [91]. While increasing investment in individual children could be adaptive if it puts them at a long-term advantage in survival and/or reproduction [58,78,80,81,92], empirical tests of increasing scope and sophistication have found that short-term reproductive success is consistently correlated with longer-term reproductive success after two to four generations [72,[93][94][95]. Such studies also find that while low fertility decreases reproductive success, it substantially increases the socio-economic success of descendants (e.g.…”

Section: (B) Empirical Connectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Status competition, inequality, and fertility: implications for the demographic transition

Shenk

Kaplan

Hooper

2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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The role that social status plays in small-scale societies suggests that status may be important for understanding the evolution of human fertility decisions, and for understanding how such decisions play out in modern contexts. This paper explores whether modelling competition for status—in the sense of relative rank within a society—can help shed light on fertility decline and the demographic transition. We develop a model of how levels of inequality and status competition affect optimal investment by parents in the embodied capital (health, strength, and skills) and social status of offspring, focusing on feedbacks between individual decisions and socio-ecological conditions. We find that conditions similar to those in demographic transition societies yield increased investment in both embodied capital and social status, generating substantial decreases in fertility, particularly under conditions of high inequality and intense status competition. We suggest that a complete explanation for both fertility variation in small-scale societies and modern fertility decline will take into account the effects of status competition and inequality.

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Social and biological determinants of reproductive success in Swedish males and females born 1915–1929

Cited by 50 publications

References 52 publications

Understanding the nature of wealth and its effects on human fitness

Understanding the nature of wealth and its effects on human fitness

The effect of school performance upon marriage and long-term reproductive success in 10,000 Swedish males and females born 1915–1929

Status competition, inequality, and fertility: implications for the demographic transition

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