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IS FERTILITY AFTER THE DEMOGRAPHICTRANSITION MALADAPTIVE?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2018

Rosemary L. Hopcroft
Rosemary L. Hopcroft*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC, USA
*
1Corresponding author. Email: rlhopcro@uncc.edu
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Summary

Fitness is always relative to the fitness of others inthe group or breeding population. Even in verylow-fertility societies, individual fitness asmeasured by the share of genes in subsequentgenerations may still be maximized. Further, sexualselection theory from evolutionary biology suggeststhat the relationship between status and fertilitywill differ for males and females. For this reasonit is important to examine the relationship betweenstatus and fertility separately for males andfemales–something few demographic studies offertility do. When male fertility is measuredseparately, high-status men (as measured by theirwealth and personal income) have higher fertilitythan low-status men, even in very low-fertilitysocieties, so individual males appear to bemaximizing their fitness within the constraintsposed by a modern society. Thus male fertilitycannot be considered maladaptive. When femalefertility is measured separately, in both very high-and very low-fertility societies, there is not muchvariance across women of different statuses incompleted fertility. Only in societies currentlychanging rapidly (with falling fertility rates) issomewhat high variance across women of differentstatuses in completed fertility found. What is seenacross all phases of the demographic transitionappears to be a continuation of two somewhatdifferent evolved human reproductive strategies–onemale, one female–in changing social and materialcontexts. Whether contemporary female fertility ismaladaptive remains an open question.

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Type
Research Article
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Journal of Biosocial Science , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , March 2019 , pp. 157 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2018 

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