Copyright

Oskar Burger; Ronald Lee; Rebecca Sear;

Published On

2024-06-14

Page Range

pp. 741–758

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

32. Human Evolutionary Demography

Closing Thoughts

Chapter of: Human Evolutionary Demography(pp. 741–758)
A complete understanding of demographic patterns and behaviours is not possible without including the role of evolutionary processes. Many challenges in the social sciences, and in demography in particular, can be more readily met if they include the rich collection of perspectives, models, tools, and theories that evolutionary sciences can provide. Perhaps unexpectedly, the benefits of this inclusion can be indirect, as many benefits of an evolutionary perspective may take the form of a new way of approaching an old problem that leads to insights independent of any goal related to isolating the role of natural selection or adaptation. In other cases, the role of adaptation may have been under-appreciated and can lead to a different understanding of the mechanisms involved. To help human evolutionary demography improve going forward, we offer two general recommendations. One is improving the integration of contemporary developments in evolutionary thought about the role of culture and environment, such as dual-inheritance theory, epigenetics, and the role of social learning and cultural transmission. Many of these developments reflect an increasingly sophisticated understanding of cultural processes in and understanding of core concepts like fitness and heritability. The role of culture may be a productive point of contact between the social sciences and evolutionary social sciences given shared interests in this area. Second is a call to re-invigorate evolutionary demography with some of the classical ideas that come from life history theory and population ecology, such as the use of energy and resource budgets to structure tradeoffs, a focus on the role of ecological factors like density and resources, and the use of formal mathematical models.

Contributors

Oskar Burger

(author)
Senior Research Manager and head of the Quantitative Best Practices Team at OMNI Institute
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7552-5851

Oskar Burger is Senior Research Manager and head of the Quantitative Best Practices Team at OMNI Institute, an applied social science consultancy. He received his PhD in Anthropology at the University of New Mexico in 2011 and worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research from 2012 to 2015. He has worked on topics such as aging, population growth, global public health, and program evaluation.

Ronald Lee

(author)
Emeritus Professor of Demography and Economics at University of California, Berkeley
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9755-0436

Ronald Lee is an Emeritus Professor of Demography and Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, with a 1967 MA in Demography from Berkeley and a 1971 Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard. His interest in intergenerational transfers in contemporary human societies led him to begin working on evolutionary theories of aging, mathematical life history theory and the evolution of social organization across species.

Rebecca Sear

(author)
Director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4315-0223

Rebecca Sear is a demographer, anthropologist and human behavioural ecologist who works on questions of demographic and public health interest, including fertility and reproductive development, child health and mortality, and health inequalities; with a particular interest in how family relationships influence these outcomes. She is co-Founder of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association, and currently Director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London.