12. Genetic Evolutionary Demography

Abstract

Since the 1990s biodemographers comparing demographic schedules across divergent species have highlighted features in common, plausibly reflecting evolutionary influences in common. Optimal life history models and stochastic vitality models garner inspiration from Darwinian theory. Models for genetic load go further, explicitly incorporating natural selection, mutation, and recombination and consequences for genomes. These models draw age-specific demographic implications from assumptions about mutation accumulation. The genetic variants posited by the theory are now coming into observation in genomic data. A search is underway for contemporary effects of genetic load on measures of health, aging, and survival. It may be possible to tell how far an evolutionary heritage from deep in the past persists amid the altered environments of the present, shaping demographic regularities.