Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship Between Status and Fertility

This 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 individual social status and fertility is often clear in less-developed, pre-transitional societies, particularly for men. Once the demographic transition begins, it is elite families, particularly the women of elite families, who lead the way in fertility decline. Post-transition, the evidence from a variety of developed societies in Europe, North America and East Asia is that high-status men (particularly men with high personal income) do have more children on average than lower-status men. The reverse is often true of women, although there is evidence that this is changing in Nordic countries. The implications of these observations for evolutionary theory are also discussed. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the social sciences with an interest in evolutionary sociology, evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology, demography, and fertility.

Rosemary L. Hopcroft is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, U.S. She has published widely in the areas of evolutionary sociology and comparative and historical sociology in journals including the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Evolution and Human Behavior, and Human Nature. She is the author of Evolution and Gender: Why it Matters for Contemporary Life (Routledge 2016), editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society (2018) and co-author of The Handbook of Sex Differences (2023).

Martin Fieder is Associate Professor of Evolutionary Demography at the University of Vienna, Austria. He works in the field of evolution, fertility, social status, religion, and behavioral genetics. He has published in the field of evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary demographics and behavior genetics in a wide range of international journals such as Evolution and Human Behavior, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, BMC Evolutionary Biology, American Journal of Human Biology, Biosocial Sciences as well as in The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society (2018).

Susanne Huber is Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology of the University of Vienna, Austria. She works on evolutionary explanations of human behavior, homogamy, and early life factor effects and has published in journals such as Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Evolution and Human Behavior, and Human Nature and in The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society (2018).