3. A Biologist’s Perspective on Human Evolutionary Demography

Abstract

Human evolutionary demography has produced striking advances by applying the lens of fitness maximization to demographic data. This approach has strong parallels and links to life history theory, which concerns life patterns (e.g., age at first reproduction, age-specific fertility, and mortality) and behavioral ecology, which examines ecological and social influences on behavior. Both those fields focus primarily on non-human species. In addition to bringing clarifying fitness thinking into demography, human evolutionary demography is helping those of us in related fields to deeper understanding, partly because we know so much in detail about human lifetimes and their diversity. Evolutionary demographers often can bring multiple scales of analysis and multiple kinds of data to bear, enriching our broader understanding. In the past, those of us who studied non-humans have not typically been able to do this—but seeing the value, in at least some cases, for some species, today we may be able to do better. Finally, there is some potential for such a cross-disciplinary approach to have real, and real-world, value in terms of making sensible and realistic policy.