I just got to thinking about this after some of the sociobiological musings on the polygamy thread ...
1) The stylised demographic facts appear to be that the birth rate falls as populations become wealthier, that this fall in the birth rate is due in significant measure to an increase in the number of childless households, and that within populations in both the developed and developing worlds, the incidence of childless households increases the further up the income distribution you go.
2) Is this not a very severe problem for most sociobiological theories, or for any theories which rely on "the desire to propagate genes" as being a major determinant of human behaviour? At the very least, it is an anomaly to be explained away, that those members of society who might be thought to be best placed to have large families, tend not to....
anyone have any ideas? dd
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You can always re-ask the question in a different way. For example, why does the birth rate increase the lower you drop in income levels and therefore descend further into poverty and stress conditions? This anticipates that high birth rates are a reaction to stress. This form of the question, normalizes low birth rates, and then presumes high birth rates are abnormal. So what is normal and aberrant are reversed, depending on how you ask the question.
>From the view of some idealized biological order, it would seem normal
that populations will always push to increase their number and are
externally limited in their growth by habitat. Perhaps this entire
idealization is wrong.
Of course I didn't like the sound of selfish genes when I first heard the term and dismissed the idea as some form of naturalizing current social conditions and attempting to find biological justifications for capitalism and greed---biologically modeled as endless expansion and competition.
In general, any hypothesis about a phenomenon, begs the question, is this a phenomenon as such? In other words, what exactly is presumed to exist, in order that we can create a theory about it or ask questions about it? In at least some cases, perhaps many, the conceptualization of the phenomenon, pre-determines the sorts of questions and the theories that can be constructed about it.
This problem with the conceptualization of phenomenon has become IMO increasingly important as science and rationalism reach into domains that have fewer and fewer directly observable material processes.
Chuck Grimes