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Demographic studies enhance the understanding of evolutionarily (mal)adaptive behaviors and phenomena in humans: a review on fertility decline and an integrated model

  • Special Feature: Review
  • Evolutionary demography: the dynamic and broad intersection of ecology and evolution
  • Published:
Population Ecology

Abstract

Recently, statistical analyses of demographic datasets have come to play an important role for studies into the evolution of human life history. In the first part of this paper, I highlight fertility decline, an evolutionarily paradoxical phenomenon in terms of fitness maximization. Then, I conduct a literature review regarding the effects of socioeconomic status on the number of offspring, especially in modern developed, (post-)industrial, and low-fertility societies. Although a non-positive relationship between them has often been recognized as a general feature of fertility decline, there actually exists a great deal of variation. Based on the review, I discuss the association between socioeconomic success and reproductive success, and tackle an evolutionary question as to why people seek higher socioeconomic success that would not directly lead to higher reproductive success. It has been suggested that, in modern competitive environments, parents should set a higher value on their investment in children, and aim to have a smaller number of high-quality children. Also, parents would maintain higher socioeconomic status for themselves so as to provide high-levels of investment in their children. In the second part, I broadly consider seemingly evolutionarily (mal)adaptive outcomes besides fertility decline, including child abuse, menopause, and suicide. The integration of the major three approaches to human behavioral and psychological research (behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and cultural evolution) could lead to a deeper understanding. I provide a model for the integrated approach. Rich empirical evidence accumulated in demographic studies, especially longitudinal and cross-cultural resources, can assist to develop a theoretical framework.

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Notes

  1. Moreover, another deeper perspective regarding the relationships between socioeconomic status and reproductive success was provided by Ruth Mace (2007, 2008); even if there existed a negative or null relationship between wealth (i.e., socioeconomic success, in the viewpoint of this paper) and fertility among sub-populations, the relationship can be positive within a sub-population (see also Alvergne and Lummaa 2014 for the empirical evidence). Based on such an argument, wealth indicates a rural–urban gradient (i.e., people in rural societies would have lower wealth and those in urban societies have higher wealth) and it is assumed that the socioeconomic environment should be quite different among sub-populations. More approaches to this keen insight are required to understand precisely the relationships between socioeconomic status and reproductive outcomes (see also Stulp et al. 2016a for a discussion about the population heterogeneity in (post-) industrial societies).

  2. They also stressed some possible biases arisen from the “researcher degrees of freedom” (the choices made about which variables to analyze and how). Stulp et al. (2016a) explained that there are a variety of choices on how the research question is optimized and how the samples and variables are selected. Then, the paper showed that such “degrees of freedom” that researchers have could bias the results and conclusion of the statistical analyses, even if the research question is fundamentally the same (pp 433–436).

  3. In addition, I briefly discuss the effect of contraceptive use on the association between socioeconomic success and reproductive success. Several previous studies have confirmed a positive relationship between socioeconomic success and mating (sexual) success, such as the frequency of sex, for men (e.g., Pérusse 1993; Kanazawa 2003, but see also; Hopcroft 2006; Nettle and Pollet 2008). If sexual satisfaction or sexual desire, rather than its actual reproductive outcomes, such as the number of offspring, has a more important role for evolved human psychological mechanisms, modern fertility decline under effective birth control technologies and rich pornographic industries may be easily understood (but see also Borgerhoff Mulder 1998). Contrary to people in pre-industrial societies, a link between mating success and actual reproductive outcomes is very loose in (post-)industrial societies because of wide-spread effective birth control methods including contraception. Currently, people can acquire sexual satisfaction without risking a variety of costs of childbearing and childcare (e.g., time, economic, physical, or mental cost). Contraception may function to loosen the relationship between socioeconomic success and reproductive success.

  4. In the integration method, it may also be reasonable to reduce some points if researchers find a clearly negative result for a hypothesis; but for (A), (B), and (C), negative (< 0) scores of the total points are methodologically outside the definition to calculate the center of gravity of the score-weighted triangle model.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Takenori Takada at Hokkaido University and Dr. Richard P. Shefferson at The University of Tokyo for inviting me to the plenary symposium on evolutionary demography at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Society of Population Ecology held in November, 2016. This paper is partly based on my presentation at the symposium. My deep thanks also go to all members and staff of the organizing committee for the meeting. Additionally, I am dearly grateful to two supervisors during my PhD project on evolutionary approaches to fertility decline: Dr. Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa and Dr. Hisashi Ohtsuki at the SOKENDAI University. I sincerely appreciate their immense help. Dr. Gert Stulp at the University of Groningen gave me valuable and constructive comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Instructive and helpful suggestions and advice from two anonymous reviewers and Dr. T. Takada greatly improved the quality of this paper. Discussions in research meetings at the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Japan, financially supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Number 26285128, PI: Dr. Ryuichi Kaneko; Grant Number 25245061, PI: Dr. Miho Iwasawa), were also useful during manuscript revision. The editorial office of the journal copy-edited the manuscript very carefully and helped further refining the overall manuscript. This study was financially supported in part by the SOKENDAI University, and JSPS Research Fellowship and KAKENHI to the author during 2013 to 2016 (DC1, Grant Number 13J04635).

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  1. Department of Evolutionary Studies of Biosystems, School of Advanced Sciences, SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies), Shonan Village, Hayama-machi, Miura-gun, Kanagawa, 240-0193, Japan

    Masahito Morita

  2. Kyoto Regional Center for the Japan Environment and Children’s Study (JECS) [Eco-Chil], Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University, #129 Molecular Biology Research Building, 53 Shogoin-Kawahara-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-8507, Japan

    Masahito Morita

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The current paper includes an improved version of unpublished content (as journal articles) from the author’s PhD Thesis (Morita 2016; for the most part, Chapters 2 and 6) submitted to SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies). This publication policy has been approved by the editorial office of Population Ecology, before submission for peer review. The written expression has been also newly re-edited from the original thesis.

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This manuscript was submitted for the special feature based on a symposium at Jozankei in Sapporo, Japan, held on 4 November 2016.

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Morita, M. Demographic studies enhance the understanding of evolutionarily (mal)adaptive behaviors and phenomena in humans: a review on fertility decline and an integrated model. Popul Ecol 60, 143–154 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10144-017-0597-y

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