title: Understanding variation in human fertility: what can we learn from evolutionary demography?
abstract: Decades of research on human fertility has presented a clear picture of how fertility varies, including its dramatic decline over the last two centuries in most parts of the world. Why fertility varies, both between and within populations, is not nearly so well understood. Fertility is a complex phenomenon, partly physiologically and partly behaviourally determined, thus an interdisciplinary approach is required to understand it. Evolutionary demographers have focused on human fertility since the 1980s. The first wave of evolutionary demographic research made major theoretical and empirical advances, investigating variation in fertility primarily in terms of fitness maximization. Research focused particularly on variation within high-fertility populations and small-scale subsistence societies and also yielded a number of hypotheses for why fitness maximization seems to break down as fertility declines during the demographic transition. A second wave of evolutionary demography research on fertility is now underway, paying much more attention to the cultural and psychological mechanisms underpinning fertility. It is also engaging with the complex, multi-causal nature of fertility variation, and with understanding fertility in complex modern and transitioning societies. Here, we summarize the history of evolutionary demographic work on human fertility, describe the current state of the field, and suggest future directions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK rebecca.sear@lshtm.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sear
authors.affiliation: Department of Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK.
authors.forename: David W
authors.initials: DW
authors.lastname: Lawson
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA.
authors.forename: Hillard
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kaplan
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology and Life Sciences & Society Program, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA.
authors.forename: Mary K
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2002-1469
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Shenk
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D003710:Demography; D005298:Fertility / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D012106:Research / Q000639:trends
keywords: evolutionary anthropology; evolutionary demography; fertility