Description
Book SynopsisThis is the first book to fully examine, from an evolutionary point of view, the association of social status and fertility in human societies before, during, and after the demographic transition. In most nonhuman social species, social status or relative rank in a social group is positively associated with the number of offspring, with high-status individuals typically having more offspring than low-status individuals. However, humans appear to be different. As societies have gotten richer, fertility has dipped to unprecedented lows, with some developed societies now at or below replacement fertility. Within rich societies, women in higher-income families often have fewer children than women in lower-income families. Evolutionary theory suggests that the relationship between social status and fertility is likely to be somewhat different for men and women, so it is important to examine this relationship for men and women separately. When this is done, the positive association between i
