SoS 285: Female Reproductive Function and Fieldwork Adventures

That's my first experiences.

Kind of along those lines, just pivoting to the chapter that you sent us from the book.

So the book is called Human Evolutionary Demography.

Could you tell us a little bit about what the book in general is about and maybe about demography as a field, kind of explaining that to the listeners? Sure.

So it's edited by demographers, and it's a reflection of the ongoing integration of demographic, evolutionary, and anthropological theories and models that emerged about 45 years ago.

And so it's a very dynamic field.

It's quite varied in its approaches.

There are people who do pure mathematical modeling.

There are people who go to the field and collect data on human relationships and adaptations of various kinds.

And it's really gained real traction in the 1990s.

And I was fortunate in the early 90s or late 80s, somewhere in there, to have a postdoc at the Population Studies Center, which is a demography center at the University of Michigan, quite renowned.

And that was really formative for me as well.

I'd had this fieldwork and ideas about adaptation I did not know what life history theory was.

I had not been trained in that where essentially that's where my theoretical framework comes from.

But also it was really funny because too, I also, in the summertime, they asked the postdocs if they would teach a course together to the demography grad students.

And we all said yes.

And I said, oh, cool.

Let's teach some evolutionary theory and adaptation.

And they were like, why? It hadn't reached that pop center yet.

Now, of course, it's an important pop center for

that as well.

And so it was all these wonderful ideas coming together at that point in time and different perspectives on those.

It had not occurred to demographers that it really might be good to have long birth spaces in order to raise kids and that that could be a demographic strategy rather than necessarily long.

a failing of the system.

The people who edited are certainly some of the, shall we say, drivers along with many other people of this.