For a biologist, it is a remarkable thing to find a behavior that promotes zero fitness. If it were an isolated example, it could easily be dismissed as a maladaptive oddity, destined always to remain rare as it is in all wild species because of its intense disfavor under natural selection. In humans, however, attraction to childlessness and the childfree lifestyle is now rampant across the developed world. Most of the published explanations for this have involved effects associated with various types of socio-cultural/economic conditioning, as represented in this news article. An alternative interpretation however, is that this recent and dramatic shift in human mating behavior is an indirect byproduct of natural selection, associated with shifting selection regimes over evolutionary time. I have developed this idea in a recent paper (referenced below) that appeared in the October issue of Oikos. I would be happy to send a pdf file of the paper to any readers that request it.
Aarssen, L.W. (2007) Some bold evolutionary predictions for the future of mating in humans. Oikos 116: 1768-1778. ... to reduce her CO2 footprint. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=495495&in_page_id=1879 Matheus C. Carvalho PhD student Kitasato University - School of Fishery Sciences Japan
