Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-zzh7m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T02:26:35.005Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Demography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

By
James Holland Jones
Edited by
Michael P. Muehlenbein
Michael P. Muehlenbein
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
Get access

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Demography lies at the heart of every statement about selection. Fitness is generally understood to be the relative proportion that an individual unit contributes to a population of such units. These populations could easily be of individuals, genes, or even groups. The way that a unit comes to make a larger contribution to a population is to have a growth rate greater than that of competitors, leading to a more technical definition of fitness as the instantaneous rate of increase. Since fitness is a growth rate, considerations of the size and composition of population – i.e., demographic considerations – are central to any evolutionary story. Life history theory is the evolutionary study of the major events of the life cycle. It is the body of theory that explains why characteristics such as life span, age at maturity, and the tempo and duration of reproduction vary between species. Life history theory is intimately related to demography as explaining the age pattern of reproductive investments – what Schaffer (1983) refers to as “the general life history problem” – is a fundamentally demographic question.

In this chapter, I will focus the discussion on formal demography, the collection of mathematical and statistical tools for enumerating populations, measuring their vital rates (i.e., rates of birth, death, and marriage) and related quantities, and projecting how they will change in structure, size, and composition. These same tools, which were largely developed by social scientists, appear repeatedly in the ecological and evolutionary literature.

Type
Chapter
Information
Human Evolutionary Biology , pp. 74 - 91
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bongaarts, J. (1978). A framework for analyzing the proximate determinants of fertility. Population and Development Review, 4, 105–132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borgerhoff Mulder, M. (1992). Demography of pastoralists: preliminary data on the Datoga of Tanzania. Human Ecology, 20, 383–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brass, W. (1971). On the scale of mortality. In Biological Aspects of Demography, Brass, W. (ed.). London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 69–110.Google Scholar
Brass, W. (1975). Methods for Estimating Fertility and Mortality from Limited and Defective Data. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina International Program of Laboratories for Population Statistics.Google Scholar
Bribiescas, R. G. (1996). Testerone levels among Aché hunter-gatherer men: a functional interpretation of population variation among adult males. Human Nature, 7, 163–188.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bronström, G. (1985). Practical aspects on the estimation of parameters in Coale's model for marital fertility. Demography, 22, 625–631.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caswell, H. (1978). A general formula for the sensitivity of population growth rate to changes in life history parameters. Theoretical Population Biology, 14, 215–230.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Caswell, H. (2001). Matrix Population Models: Construction, Analysis and Interpretation. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.Google Scholar
Charlesworth, B. (1994). Evolution in Age-Structured Populations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coale, A. J. (1969). The decline of fertility in Europe from the French Revolution to World War II. In Fertility and Family Planning: a World View, Behrman, S. B., Corsa, L. and Freedman, R. (eds). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Coale, A. J. (1972). The Growth and Structure of Human Populations: a Mathematical Investigation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Coale, A. J. and Trussell, J. (1974). Model fertility schedules: variations in the age-structure of childbearing. Population Index, 40, 185–258.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coale, A. J. and Trussell, J. (1978). Technical note: finding two parameters that specify a model schedule of marital fertility. Population Index, 44, 202–213.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coale, A. J., Demeny, P. and Vaughn, B. (1983). Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Davis, K. and Blake, J. (1956). Social structure and fertility: an analytic framework. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 4, 211–235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, T. and Sigmon, K. (2004). MATLAB Primer. New York: Chapman and Hall.Google Scholar
Dyke, B., Gage, T. B., Ballou, J. D., et al. (1993). Model life tables for the smaller New World monkeys. American Journal of Primatology, 29, 268–285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dyke, B., Gage, T. B., Alford, P. L., et al. (1995). Model life table for captive chimpanzees. American Journal of Primatology, 37, 25–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Early, J. D. and Peters, J. F. (1990). The Population Dynamics of the Mucajai Yanomama. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Eaton, J. W. and Mayer, A. J. (1953). The social biology of very high fertility among the Hutterites: the demography of a unique population. Human Biology, 25, 206–264.Google ScholarPubMed
Ellison, P. T. (1981). Threshold hypotheses, developmental age, and menstrual function. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 54, 337–340.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ellison, P. T., Panter-Brick, C., Lipson, S. F. et al. (1993). The ecological context of human ovarian function. Human Reproduction, 8, 2248–2258.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fisher, R. A. (1958). The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. New York: Dover.Google Scholar
Frisch, R. E. (1978). Population, food intake, and fertility. Science, 199, 22–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gage, T. B. and Dyke, B. (1988). Model life tables for the larger Old World monkeys. American Journal of Primatology, 16, 305–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodall, J. (1986). The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gurven, M., Kaplan, H. et al. (2007). Mortality experience of Tsimane Amerindians of Bolivia: regional variation and temporal trends. American Journal of Human Biology, 19, 376–398.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hajnal, J. (1947). The analysis of birth statistics in the light of the recent international recovery of the birth-rate. Population Studies, 1, 137–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, W. D. (1966). The moulding of senescence by natural selection. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 12, 12–45.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harary, F. (1969). Graph Theory. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harpending, H. (1994). Infertility and forager demography. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 93, 385–390.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Henry, L. (1953). Fécondité des mariages: nouvelle méthode de mesure. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Henry, L. (1961). Some data on natural fertility. Eugenics Quarterly, 8, 81–91.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hill, K. (1993). Life history theory and evolutionary anthropology. Evolutionary Anthropology, 2, 78–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, K. and Hurtado, A. M. (1996). Aché Life History. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Hill, K. and Kaplan, H. (1999). Life history traits in humans: theory and empirical studies. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, 397–430.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinde, A. (1998). Demographic Methods. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Howell, N. (1979). The Demography of the Dobe!Kung. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Howell, N. (1986). Demographic anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 15, 219–246.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
,INDEPTH Network (2002). Population, Health, and Survival at INDEPTH sites. Ottawa: IDRC.
Jones, J. H. (2005). Fetal programming: adaptive life-history tactic or making the best of a bad start?American Journal of Human Biology, 17, 22–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jones, J. H. (2007). demog R: a package for evolutionary demographic analysis in R. Journal of Statistical Software, 22, 1–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, J. H. (2009). The force of selection on the human life cycle. Evolution and Human Behavior, 30(5), 305–314.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keyfitz, N. (1977). Introduction to the Mathematics of Populations. Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Keyfitz, N. and Caswell, H. (2005). Applied Mathematical Demography. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Keyfitz, N. and Flieger, W. (1990). World Population Growth and Aging: Demographic Trends in the Late Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lande, R. A. (1982). A quantitative genetic theory of life history evolution. Ecology, 63, 607–615.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leslie, P. and Winterhalder, B. (2002). Demographic consequences of unpredictability in fertility outcomes. American Journal of Human Biology, 14, 168–183.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leslie, P. H. (1945). On the use of matrices in certain population mathematics. Biometrics, 33, 213–245.Google ScholarPubMed
Lotka, A. J. (1907). Relation between birth rates and death rates. Science, 26, 21–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lotka, A. J. (1922). The stability of the normal age distribution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 8, 339–345.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mace, R. (2000). Evolutionary ecology of human life history. Animal Behaviour, 59, 1–10.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morris, W. F. and Doak, D. F. (2002). Quantitative Conservation Biology. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.Google Scholar
Pennington, R. and Harpending, H. (1991). Effect of infertility on the population structure of the Herero and Mbanderu of Southern Africa. Social Biology, 38, 127–139.Google Scholar
Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P. and Guillot, F. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modelling Population Processes. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
,R Development Core Team (2008). R: A language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
Roth, E. A. (1993). A reexamination of Rendille population regulation. American Anthropologist, 95, 597–611.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roth, E. A. (2004). Culture, Biology, and Anthropological Demography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryder, N. (1965). The cohort as a concept in the study of social change. American Sociological Review, 30, 843–861.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryder, N. (1986). Observations on the history of cohort fertility in the United States. Population and Development Review, 12, 617–643.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaffer, W. M. (1983). The application of optimal control theory to the general life history problem. American Naturalist, 121, 418–431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sear, R., Steele, F., Mcgregor, A. A., et al. (2002). The effects of kin on child mortality in rural Gambia. Demography, 39, 43–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sear, R., Mace, R. and Mcgregor, I. A. (2003). The effects of kin on female fertility in rural Gambia. Evolution and Human Behavior, 24, 25–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharpe, F. and Lotka, A. J. (1911). A problem in age-distribution. Philosophical Magazine, 21, 435–438.Google Scholar
Siegel, J. S. and Swanson, D. A. (2004). The Methods and Materials of Demography. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Stearns, S. C. (1992). The Evolution of Life Histories. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wilmoth, J. (2007). Human Mortality Database. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.Google Scholar
Wood, J. W. (1994). Dynamics of Human Reproduction: Biology, Biometry, Demography. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×