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      The Reproductive Ecology of Industrial Societies, Part I : Why Measuring Fertility Matters

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          Abstract

          Is fertility relevant to evolutionary analyses conducted in modern industrial societies? This question has been the subject of a highly contentious debate, beginning in the late 1980s and continuing to this day. Researchers in both evolutionary and social sciences have argued that the measurement of fitness-related traits (e.g., fertility) offers little insight into evolutionary processes, on the grounds that modern industrial environments differ so greatly from those of our ancestral past that our behavior can no longer be expected to be adaptive. In contrast, we argue that fertility measurements in industrial society are essential for a complete evolutionary analysis: in particular, such data can provide evidence for any putative adaptive mismatch between ancestral environments and those of the present day, and they can provide insight into the selection pressures currently operating on contemporary populations. Having made this positive case, we then go on to discuss some challenges of fertility-related analyses among industrialized populations, particularly those that involve large-scale databases. These include “researcher degrees of freedom” (i.e., the choices made about which variables to analyze and how) and the different biases that may exist in such data. Despite these concerns, large datasets from multiple populations represent an excellent opportunity to test evolutionary hypotheses in great detail, enriching the evolutionary understanding of human behavior.

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          Nonresponse Rates and Nonresponse Bias in Household Surveys

          R. Groves (2006)
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            "Economic man" in cross-cultural perspective: behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies.

            Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model - based on self-interest - fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life.
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              The past explains the present

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Rebecca.Sear@lshtm.ac.uk
                Journal
                Hum Nat
                Hum Nat
                Human Nature (Hawthorne, N.y.)
                Springer US (New York )
                1045-6767
                1936-4776
                26 September 2016
                26 September 2016
                2016
                : 27
                : 4
                : 422-444
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Population Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT UK
                [2 ]Department of Sociology, University of Groningen / Inter-University Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS), Grote Rozenstraat 31, 9712 TG Groningen, The Netherlands
                [3 ]Department of Psychology, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB T1K 3M4 Canada
                Article
                9269
                10.1007/s12110-016-9269-4
                5107203
                27670436
                de96f8db-bbf0-4cfc-b402-d580a3b7b419
                © The Author(s) 2016

                Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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                © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

                Sociology
                fertility,(mal)adaptive behavior,industrial population,secondary database,researcher degrees of freedom,family

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