Human Evolutionary Demography: Closing Thoughts

Abstract

A complete understanding of demographic patterns and behaviours is not possible without including the role of evolutionary processes. Many challenges in the social sciences, and in demography in particular, can be more readily met if they include the rich collection of perspectives, models, tools, and theories that evolutionary sciences can provide. Perhaps unexpectedly, the benefits of this inclusion can be indirect, as many benefits of an evolutionary perspective may take the form of a new way of approaching an old problem that leads to insights independent of any goal related to isolating the role of natural selection or adaptation. In other cases, the role of adaptation may have been under-appreciated and can lead to a different understanding of the mechanisms involved. To help human evolutionary demography improve going forward, we offer two general recommendations. One is improving the integration of contemporary developments in evolutionary thought about the role of culture and environment, such as dual-inheritance theory, epigenetics, and the role of social learning and cultural transmission. Many of these developments reflect an increasingly sophisticated understanding of cultural processes in and understanding of core concepts like fitness and heritability. The role of culture may be a productive point of contact between the social sciences and evolutionary social sciences given shared interests in this area. Second is a call to re-invigorate evolutionary demography with some of the classical ideas that come from life history theory and population ecology, such as the use of energy and resource budgets to structure tradeoffs, a focus on the role of ecological factors like density and resources, and the use of formal mathematical models.