Someone to live for: effects of partner and dependent children on preventable death in a population wide sample from Northern Ireland.

ABSTRACT: How to allocate resources between somatic maintenance and reproduction in a manner that maximizes inclusive fitness is a fundamental challenge for all organisms. Life history theory predicts that effort put into somatic maintenance (health) should vary with sex, mating and parenting status because men and women have different costs of reproduction, and because life transitions such as family formation alter the fitness payoffs from investing in current versus future reproduction. However, few tests of how such life history parameters influence behaviours closely linked to survival exist. Here we examine whether specific forms of preventable death (accidents/suicides, alcohol-related causes, and other preventable diseases) are predicted by marital status and dependent offspring in a modern

SUBMITTER: Uggla C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4286120 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature