Volume 21 - Article 16 | Pages 469–502  

Darwin and Lotka: Two Concepts of Population

By Philip Kreager

Abstract

Population was the subject of two major conceptual developments in the second quarter of the 20th century. Both were inspired by evolutionary biology. Lotka developed a mathematics of evolution in human and other species by analogy to thermodynamic models. His theory followed demographic practice in treating populations as closed units, commonly macro-scale, and in inferring underlying processes of change from aggregate outcomes. In contrast, the evolutionary synthesis – a collaborative product of research in experimental and population genetics, natural history, and related fields of biology – followed Darwin in insisting that close observation of small-scale population processes and local environments is necessary to understand population change. Because gene-environment interactions rely on expanding and contracting networks of individuals, the populations in question are by nature open. Despite the apparent conflict between these positions, the synthesis broke new ground in the history of population thought by showing how the two approaches could be combined. Demography, however, moved away from evolutionary and population biology as a source of theory in the early post-war era, and this conceptual redevelopment of population was scarcely remarked upon. More recently, the tremendous development of genetics has recalled demographers’ attention to evolutionary theory as an inescapable element of modern population thought. This paper provides a historical introduction to mid-20th-century developments in Darwinian population thinking, and the implications of its dual conceptualisation of population for demography. Its potential importance extends beyond the problem of gene-environment interactions to many aspects of social network analysis.

Author’s Affiliation

• Philip Kreager - University of Oxford, United Kingdom EMAIL

Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research

Indonesia against the trend? Ageing and inter-generational wealth flows in two Indonesian communities
Volume 19 - Article 52

Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research

Early unintended childbearing and unsecured debt in the United States
Volume 53 - Article 27    | Keywords: demography, fertility, gender, life course, mothers

Neighbors’ social attitudes predict variations in live births among the Amish of Holmes County, Ohio, United States
Volume 53 - Article 25    | Keywords: Amish, diffusion, fertility, household, proximity, religion, spatial analysis

Analysing migrant fertility using machine learning techniques: An application of random survival forest to longitudinal data from France
Volume 53 - Article 21    | Keywords: fertility, immigrants, machine learning, random survival forest, survival analysis

The partnership, fertility, and employment trajectories of immigrants in the United Kingdom: An intersectional life course approach using three-channel sequence analysis
Volume 53 - Article 10    | Keywords: employment, fertility, immigrants, multi-channel sequence analysis, partnership, United Kingdom

Where do we go from here? Partnership-parenthood trajectories of cohabitation as first union during young adulthood in the United States
Volume 53 - Article 9    | Keywords: cohabitation, family inequality, fertility, marriage, race/ethnicity, transition to adulthood, union formation, United States of America