Original articlesMore Status or More Children? Social Status, Fertility Reduction, and Long-Term Fitness
Section snippets
Catastrophic population dynamics
Classic models of logistic population growth assume that animal populations grow until they reach a stable state at or near K. To the extent that competition is a force shaping the evolutionary process, Darwin's initial formulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection assumed that populations are usually stable and at or near K. Under such conditions, individuals with the highest number of surviving offspring (i.e., the highest lifetime reproductive success) are favored by selection.
Social status and differential survival
The second element in our model posits that a strategy is available to individuals that increases the probability of survival through a crash relative to others in a population, but which is energetically costly to implement. Here we argue that in ranked and stratified human societies, social status is an important factor determining the probability of lineage survival through crashes. Such might be the case where a population is differentiated in terms of priority of access to resources or
Differential survival and fertility reduction: a simple model
Because the survivors of a population crash form the base for the next period of growth, it stands to reason that natural selection might favor individuals or lineages with some heritable capacity to survive (or have offspring that survive) infrequent crashes at a higher probability than others in a population. The third element in our model is the proposition that long-term fitness benefits in the form of increased survivorship through a demographic bottleneck crisis may outweigh or equal the
Status competition and fertility reduction
This model shows that, under plausible conditions, a strategy that increases the probability of survival through infrequent crashes could be selected for even if it entailed reduction of fertility in relation to others in the group with a lower probability of survivorship. Put another way, this model captures the specific environmental conditions under which reduced fertility could be adaptive. These conditions include the existence of demographic bottlenecks of sufficient frequency and
Conclusion
We have argued that what is often passed off as an occasional perquisite of high social status—higher probability of survival through famines and other disasters that create demographic bottlenecks—may in fact be the evolutionary raison d'être of status striving. Under these circumstances, humans might be willing to pay more for status than it appears to be worth in terms of net economic return in the short run. Some psychological aspects of behavior associated with social striving appear to
Acknowledgements
We thank Martin Daly, Jennifer Nerissa Davis, Henry Harpending, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Hillard Kaplan, Jane Lancaster, Fraser Neiman, Eric Smith, Troy Tucker, Eckart Voland, Margo Wilson, and Carla Wofsey for comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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