Women's education has emerged as a central predictor of fertility decline, but the many ways that education affects fertility have not been subject to detailed comparative investigation. Taking an ...evolutionary biosocial approach, we use structural equation modelling to examine potential pathways between education and fertility including: infant/child mortality, women's participation in the labour market, husband's education, social network influences, and contraceptive use or knowledge across three very different contexts: Matlab, Bangladesh; San Borja, Bolivia; and rural Poland. Using a comparable set of variables, we show that the pathways by which education affects fertility differ in important ways, yet also show key similarities. For example, we find that across all three contexts, education is associated with delayed age at first birth via increasing women's labour-force participation, but this pathway only influences fertility in rural Poland. In Matlab and San Borja, education is associated with lower local childhood mortality, which influences fertility, but this pathway is not important in rural Poland. Similarities across sites suggest that there are common elements in how education drives demographic transitions cross-culturally, but the differences suggest that local socioecologies also play an important role in the relationship between education and fertility decline.
The demographic transition is an ongoing global phenomenon in which high fertility and mortality rates are replaced by low fertility and mortality. Despite intense interest in the causes of the ...transition, especially with respect to decreasing fertility rates, the underlying mechanisms motivating it are still subject to much debate. The literature is crowded with competing theories, including causal models that emphasize (i) mortality and extrinsic risk, (ii) the economic costs and benefits of investing in self and children, and (iii) the cultural transmission of low-fertility social norms. Distinguishing between models, however, requires more comprehensive, better-controlled studies than have been published to date. We use detailed demographic data from recent fieldwork to determine which models produce the most robust explanation of the rapid, recent demographic transition in rural Bangladesh. To rigorously compare models, we use an evidence-based statistical approach using model selection techniques derived from likelihood theory. This approach allows us to quantify the relative evidence the data give to alternative models, even when model predictions are not mutually exclusive. Results indicate that fertility, measured as either total fertility or surviving children, is best explained by models emphasizing economic factors and related motivations for parental investment. Our results also suggest important synergies between models, implicating multiple causal pathways in the rapidity and degree of recent demographic transitions.
Cultural evolutionary theory and human behavioural ecology offer different, but compatible approaches to understanding human demographic behaviour. For much of their 30 history, these approaches have ...been deployed in parallel, with few explicit attempts to integrate them empirically. In this paper, we test hypotheses drawn from both approaches to explore how reproductive behaviour responds to cultural changes among Mosuo agriculturalists of China. Specifically, we focus on how age at last birth (ALB) varies in association with temporal shifts in fertility policies, spatial variation and kinship ecologies. We interpret temporal declines in ALB as plausibly consistent with demographic front-loading of reproduction in light of fertility constraints and later ages at last birth in matrilineal populations relative to patrilineal ones as consistent with greater household cooperation for reproductive purposes in the former. We find little evidence suggesting specific transmission pathways for the spread of norms regulating ALB, but emphasize that the rapid pace of change strongly suggests that learning processes were involved in the general decline in ALB over time. The different predictions of models we employ belie their considerable overlap and the potential for a synthetic approach to generate more refined tests of evolutionary hypotheses of demographic behaviour.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution’.
Dowry Inflation: Perception or Reality? Lankes, Jane; Shenk, Mary K.; Towner, Mary C. ...
Population research and policy review,
08/2022, Letnik:
41, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Research on South Asia has consistently documented increasing dowry amounts over the past several decades. Although recent studies have largely concluded this is due to an overall rise in prices, and ...therefore not a real increase per se, methodological limitations make this difficult to discern. In this paper, we assess: (1) if dowry amounts increased faster than the general inflation rate, and (2) how dowry amounts increased relative to income. Using data on rural Bangladesh from 1955 to 2010, we show trends in gross dowry, net dowry, and the ratio of dowry to income using multiple inflation adjustments. We find that only some aspects of dowries rose in certain periods, but the ratio of dowry to income steadily increased across time. We discuss implications of these results for understanding past contradictory findings and for gaining insight into the mechanisms by which widespread perceptions of dowry inflation may be maintained.
Evolutionary biologists have long considered menopause to be a fundamental puzzle in understanding human fertility behaviour, as post-menopausal women are no longer physiologically capable of direct ...reproduction. Menopause typically occurs between 45 and 55 years of age, but across cultures and history, women often stop reproducing many years before menopause. Unlike age at first reproduction or even birth spacing, a woman nearing the end of her reproductive cycle is able to reflect upon the offspring she already has—their numbers and phenotypic qualities, including sexes. This paper reviews demographic data on age at last birth both across and within societies, and also presents a case study of age at last birth in rural Bangladeshi women. In this Bangladeshi sample, age at last birth preceded age at menopause by an average of 11 years, with marked variation around that mean, even during a period of high fertility. Moreover, age at last birth was not strongly related to age at menopause. Our literature review and case study provide evidence that stopping behaviour needs to be more closely examined as an important part of human reproductive strategies and life-history theory. Menopause may be a final marker of permanent reproductive cessation, but it is only one piece of the evolutionary puzzle.
Humans are able to thrive in a multitude of ecological and social environments, including varied environments over an individual lifetime. Migration—leaving one place of residence for another—is a ...central feature of many people's life histories, and environmental change goes hand‐in‐hand with migration, both in terms of cause and consequence. Climate change has amplified this connection between environment and migration, with the potential to profoundly impact millions of lives. Although climate‐induced migration has been at the forefront of other disciplines in the social sciences, evolutionary anthropologists (EAs) have given it little attention. In this paper we draw upon existing literature and contribute our EA perspective to present a framework for analyzing climate‐induced migration that utilizes theoretical approaches from a variety of social science disciplines. We focus on three overlapping dimensions—time, space, and severity—relevant to understanding the impact of climate change on human migration. We apply this framework to case studies from North America of people impacted by climate change and extreme weather events, including hurricanes, droughts, rising sea‐levels, and wildfires. We also consider how access to both economic and social resources influence decisions regarding migration. Research focused on climate‐induced human migration can benefit equally from the addition of EA perspectives and a more interdisciplinary theoretical approach.
This paper uses the framework of intensive and extensive kinship systems to organize and understand a large body of research on consanguineous marriage across cultures, particularly studies in ...demography and development that document decreasing consanguineous marriage with market integration. We argue that while agricultural subsistence is often associated with intensive kinship systems, including kin marriages, increasing engagement in a market economy prompts a shift to a more extensive kinship system and possibly a novel cultural niche. We test this model using quantitative and qualitative data from rural Matlab, Bangladesh, which is rapidly transitioning from an agricultural to a market-based economy, and find that our model is partly supported by our quantitative data and strongly supported by our qualitative data. Yet we also observe that rates of consanguineous marriage are not decreasing in Matlab, possibly as a result of a new trend toward love marriages among cousins that is replacing an earlier custom of arranged marriages among cousins focused on property and family considerations.
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Neuroendocrine carcinoma of the cervix is a rare and aggressive HPV-mediated malignancy with a high recurrence rate.
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Combination ipilimumab and nivolumab has been shown to effect disease response ...in pulmonary neuroendocrine carcinoma.
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We present three patients with recurrent neuroendocrine cervical carcinoma who experienced response to ipilimumab/nivolumab.
Neuroendocrine carcinoma of the cervix is a rare subtype of cervical cancer with a poor prognosis. Primary treatment of this disease involves a combination of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. The majority of patients will experience disease recurrence, for which there exist no treatment guidelines. Because of histologic similarities, small cell lung cancer has often informed management of extrapulmonary neuroendocrine carcinomas. Immunotherapy regimens, including a combination of ipilimumab and nivolumab, have been shown to have activity in small cell lung cancer. In this report, we present the cases of 3 patients with recurrent neuroendocrine carcinoma of the cervix who experienced durable response to a combination of ipilimumab and nivolumab.
Persistent interest lies in gender inequality, especially with regard to the favouring of sons over daughters. Economists are concerned with how privilege is transmitted across generations, and ...anthropologists have long studied sex-biased inheritance norms. There has, however, been no focused cross-cultural investigation of how parent-offspring correlations in wealth vary by offspring sex. We estimate these correlations for 38 wealth measures, including somatic and relational wealth, from 15 populations ranging from hunter-gatherers to small-scale farmers. Although small sample sizes limit our statistical power, we find no evidence of ubiquitous male bias, at least as inferred from comparing parent-son and parent-daughter correlations. Rather we find wide variation in signatures of sex bias, with evidence of both son and daughter-biased transmission. Further, we introduce a model that helps pinpoint the conditions under which simple mid-point parent-offspring wealth correlations can reveal information about sex-biased parental investment. Our findings are relevant to the study of female-biased kinship by revealing just how little normative descriptors of kinship systems, such as patrilineal inheritance, capture intergenerational correlations in wealth, and how variable parent-son and parent-daughter correlations can be. This article is part of the theme issue 'The evolution of female-biased kinship in humans and other mammals'.
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