Fertility Preference Inversely Related to ‘Legacy Drive’ in Women, But Not in Men: Interpreting the Evolutionary Roots, and Future, of the ‘Childfree’ Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Online survey results for a university sample population indicated that both male (n=361) and female (n=764) participants had a mean desired lifetime fertility of 2.2 offspring. For females, desired fertility had a significant negative relationship with level of interest in life course goals associated with a rewarding career, acquiring fame, and making contribution to ideas and discoveries, but a significant positive relationship with the goal of inspiring others with one's religious beliefs. In contrast for males, none of these life goals was related to variation in lifetime fertility preference. We interpret these data in the context of the 'transmission competition' hypothesis-an evolutionary explanation for decreasing fertility in developed countries, where for females, gene transmission is limited by competition from 'meme transmission', the latter represented in modern times by the pursuit and achievement of life course goals perceived as providing an enduring personal legacy. This accounts, we suggest, for the origin of the now popular 'childfree' culture. Attraction to accomplishment-based memetic legacy and the childfree lifestyle will eventually be eclipsed, we predict-again because of the effects of natural selection-by an emerging culture driven to a large extent by an intrinsic attraction to parenthood-'parenting drive'.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".