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5 - Demography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

By
James Holland Jones
Edited by
Michael P. Muehlenbein
Michael P. Muehlenbein
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Summary

INTRODUCTION

Demography lies at the heart of every statement about selection. Fitness is generally understood to be the relative proportion that an individual unit contributes to a population of such units. These populations could easily be of individuals, genes, or even groups. The way that a unit comes to make a larger contribution to a population is to have a growth rate greater than that of competitors, leading to a more technical definition of fitness as the instantaneous rate of increase. Since fitness is a growth rate, considerations of the size and composition of population – i.e., demographic considerations – are central to any evolutionary story. Life history theory is the evolutionary study of the major events of the life cycle. It is the body of theory that explains why characteristics such as life span, age at maturity, and the tempo and duration of reproduction vary between species. Life history theory is intimately related to demography as explaining the age pattern of reproductive investments – what Schaffer (1983) refers to as “the general life history problem” – is a fundamentally demographic question.

In this chapter, I will focus the discussion on formal demography, the collection of mathematical and statistical tools for enumerating populations, measuring their vital rates (i.e., rates of birth, death, and marriage) and related quantities, and projecting how they will change in structure, size, and composition. These same tools, which were largely developed by social scientists, appear repeatedly in the ecological and evolutionary literature.

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Human Evolutionary Biology , pp. 74 - 91
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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