Sheppard Paula, Van Winkle Zachary
School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, 51-53 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE, UK.
Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, 42-43 Park End Street, Oxford OX1 1DJ, UK.
Evol Hum Sci. 2020 Jun 29;2:e39. doi: 10.1017/ehs.2020.38. eCollection 2020.
Life history theory, a prominent ecological model in biology, is widely used in the human sciences to make predictions about human behaviour. However, its principal assumptions have not been empirically tested. We address this gap with three research questions: (1) do humans exhibit coherent life history strategies; (2) do individuals adopt strategies along a slow-fast continuum; and (3) are socioeconomic circumstances during childhood associated with the pace of the life history strategy that an individual adopts? Data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study is used to reconstruct the life histories of US women including information on puberty, fertility, menopause and death. We introduce a novel methodological approach to evolutionary anthropology, sequence analysis, to assess if human life histories are coherent strategies and how these strategies are patterned. In subsequent analyses we used multinomial logistic regressions to test whether childhood socioeconomic status predicts the life history patterns women follow. Results provide little evidence that humans follow coherent life-history strategies; Wisconsin women are clustered by the number of children they have but not by ages at life events. Socioeconomic status does not predict which cluster women fall into, suggesting that less well-off women do not have higher fertility, as predicted.
生命史理论是生物学中一个重要的生态模型，在人文科学中被广泛用于预测人类行为。然而，其主要假设尚未得到实证检验。我们通过三个研究问题来填补这一空白：（1）人类是否表现出连贯的生命史策略；（2）个体是否沿着慢-快连续体采用策略；（3）童年时期的社会经济状况是否与个体采用的生命史策略的节奏相关？来自威斯康星纵向研究的数据被用于重构美国女性的生命史，包括青春期、生育、更年期和死亡等信息。我们引入了一种进化人类学的新方法——序列分析，以评估人类生命史是否为连贯策略以及这些策略是如何形成的。在后续分析中，我们使用多项逻辑回归来检验童年社会经济地位是否能预测女性所遵循的生命史模式。结果几乎没有证据表明人类遵循连贯的生命史策略；威斯康星州的女性按子女数量聚类，而非按生命事件发生时的年龄聚类。社会经济地位并不能预测女性属于哪个聚类，这表明并不像预期的那样，较贫困的女性生育率更高。
