Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 277, Issue 1682, Pages 773-777Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1450
Keywords
life-history theory; reproductive effort; human reproduction
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Lifetime reproductive effort (LRE) measures the total amount of metabolized energy diverted to reproduction during the lifespan. LRE captures key components of the life history and is particularly useful for describing and comparing the life histories of different organisms. Given a simple energetic production constraint, LRE is predicted to be similar in value for very different life histories. However, humans have some unique ecological characteristics that may alter LRE, such as the long post-reproductive lifespan, lengthy juvenile period and the cooperative nature of human foraging and reproduction. We calculate LRE for natural fertility human populations, compare the findings to other mammals and discuss the implications for human life-history evolution. We find that human life-history traits combine to yield the theoretically predicted value (approx. 1.4). Thus, even with the subsidized energy budget and uniqueness of the adult lifespan, human reproductive strategies converge on the same optimal value of LRE. This suggests that the fundamental demographic variables contained in LRE trade-off against one another in a predictable and highly constrained manner.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available