SEMINAR: Family matters: a comparative study of how kin influence reproductive outcomes across a range of human populations

The Speaker: Rebecca's background is interdisciplinary: having received training in zoology, statistics and biological anthropology, she has spent most of her academic career teaching demography, first at the London School of Economics and then at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She took up her current post as Reader in Population and Health at LSHTM in April 2012, and now heads the Evolutionary Demography Group http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/eph/dph/research/edg/index.htm here.

The Seminar: Her research is also interdisciplinary: she is a behavioural ecologist but largely works on human demographic data so her research aims to bridge the social and natural sciences. She is currently working on a European Research Council-funded project 'Family matters: intergenerational influences on fertility', which is investigating the influence of kin on fertility across a range of populations, using both small-scale datasets from traditional subsistence populations and large-scale, nationally representative demographic datasets. This project fits into her wider research aim, which is to test the hypothesis that humans are cooperative breeders, by examining the evidence that kin influence reproductive outcomes in all kinds of human society. This talk will describe previous and current work which has found that, though kin do influence reproductive outcomes, which kin matter varies according to ecological context.