Kermyt Anderson

University of Oklahoma | ou · Department of Anthropology

Tubal ligation is the modal form of family planning among American women aged 30 and older. As the preference for tubal ligation over cheaper, lower risk and more reliable methods, such as vasectomy, has puzzled experts, a theoretical approach that explains this preference would be useful. The present study investigates the high prevalence of volun...

The establishment of a legal father for children of unmarried parents reflects both high paternity confidence and male willingness to commit to paternal investment. Whether an unmarried man voluntarily acknowledges paternity after a child is born has important consequences for both the mother and child. This paper brings to bear a life history pers...

Independent of ecology, subsistence strategy, social complexity, or other aspects of socioecology, the altricial nature of young humans requires mothers to have help raising their offspring. What seems to be context-dependent, however, is who the helpers are, how they invest, and what the impacts of that investment are. In a series of papers that f...

A substantial theoretical and empirical literature suggests that stressful events in childhood influence the timing and patterning of subsequent sexual and reproductive behaviors. Stressful childhood environments have been predicted to produce a life history strategy in which adults are oriented more toward short-term mating behaviors and less towa...

Objectives To examine the relationships between prepregnancy diabetes mellitus (DM), gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), and prepregnancy body mass index, with several adverse birth outcomes: preterm delivery (PTB), low birthweight (LBW), and macrosomia, comparing American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) with other race/ethnic groups. Methods T...

While previous studies have examined the relationship between allocare and life history traits using a comparative sample of primates, none has focused on male care as the main predictor variable. Male care can reflect paternity, mating effort, or kinship, but regardless of the motive we expect it to have positive effects on female lifetime reprodu...

The hypothesis that father absence during childhood, as well as other forms of childhood psychosocial stress, might influence the timing of sexual maturity and adult reproductive behaviors has been the focus of considerable research. However, the majority of studies that have examined this prediction have used samples of women of European descent l...

This paper presents an analysis of the characteristics of men who become stepfathers, and their subsequent fertility patterns and lifetime reproductive success. Because women who already have children are ranked lower in the marriage market than women without children, men who marry women with children (e.g., stepfathers) are likely to have lower r...

Due to tradeoffs between mating and parental effort, men who pay child support to children from previous unions should be less likely to have subsequent children or to remarry than men who do not pay child support. I evaluate this prediction using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a nationally representative sample of American ho...

Life history theory predicts that greater extrinsic mortality will lead to earlier and higher fertility. To test this prediction, I examine the relationship between life expectancy at birth and several proxies for life history traits (ages at first sex and first marriage, total fertility rate, and ideal number of children), measured for both men an...

We've all heard that a father's involvement enriches the lives of children. But how much have we heard about how having a child affects a father's life? As Peter Gray and Kermyt Anderson reveal, fatherhood actually alters a man's sexuality, rewires his brain, and changes his hormonal profile. His very health may suffer—in the short run—and improve...

There is high demand for care among the Hispanic population in states along the U.S.-Mexico border. The objective is to describe the standard of care received by people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWH/A) at enrollment into one of five Special Projects of National Significance (SPNS) Sites located along the U.S.-Mexico border. This cross-sectional study...

South Africa, a country that is highly stratified by race, is an important location for studying the relationship between race and educational expectations. Using a longitudinal data set, we examine the educational expectations of black (African), colored (mixed race), and white (European ancestry) parents and children in Cape Town, South Africa. W...

HIV prevalence is high among South African youth. Health behavior models posit that the perceived level of risk of HIV infection is associated with the level of HIV risk behavior; however, there has been limited research in Sub-Saharan Africa on factors associated with perceived risk or on the relationship between perceived risk and risk behaviors....

HIV/AIDS knowledge is an important component of HIV/AIDS risk prevention strategies that may influence engagement in high risk behavior. This paper examines HIV/AIDS prevention knowledge among a representative sample of 4,174 youth living in Cape Town, South Africa. Data come from the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), and include black, coloured, and w...

Using a sample of men living in Albuquerque, NM, we examined the relationship between paternity confidence and men's investment in children. In humans, men may reduce their investment in a child in two ways: indirectly, by ending their relationship with the child's mother and ceasing to cohabit with the child (e.g., divorce), and directly, by alloc...

We examine the demographic correlates of paternity confidence, or men's assessment of the likelihood that they are the genetic father of a particular child. Evolutionary theory predicts that men will provide less parental investment for putative genetic offspring who are unlikely to be their actual offspring, but confidence of paternity has not bee...

The purpose of this study is to provide a description of personal lifestyles and demographic characteristics of 1,200 HIV sèropositive individuals who volunteered to participate in a Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Special Projects of National Significance (SPNS) Initiative conducted in five U.S. demonstration projects located...

Evolutionary theory predicts that males will provide less parental investment for putative offspring who are unlikely to be their actual offspring. Cross-culturally, paternity confidence (a man's assessment of the likelihood that he is the father of a putative child) is positively associated with men's involvement with children and with investment...

Investment in children is examined using a nationally representative sample of 11,211 black (African) households in South Africa. I randomly selected one child from each household in the sample and calculated the average genetic relatedness of the other household members to the focal child. Using multivariate statistical analysis to control for bac...

The stepfather relationship provides a source of potential conflict in remarriage families, because the mother and partner may have different interests in the well-being of children from a prior union. Using three different theoretical perspectives—biology, sociology, and selection—this paper examines the engagement, availability, participation, an...

Life history theory postulates tradeoffs of current versus future reproduction; in both developed and developing nations today, women face evolutionarily novel versions of these tradeoffs. Here we use a nonlinear dynamic model to explore: [1] the general issues of tradeoffs of education, work, and current fertility; [2] some specific examples (e.g....

This paper draws on evolutionary life history theory to examine nonmarital births in the context of women’s ability to secure male parental investment for their offspring. While nonmarital births are usually defined with respect to marital status the day of parturition, we adopt a more nuanced approach that corresponds to men’s willingness to commi...

Life history theory postulates tradeoffs of current versus future reproduction; today women face evolutionarily novel versions of these tradeoffs. Optimal age at first birth is the result of tradeoffs in fertility and mortality; ceteris paribus, early reproduction is advantageous. Yet modern women in developed nations experience relatively late fir...

The large human brain, the long period of juvenile dependence, long life span, and male support of reproduction are the co-evolutionary result of the human niche based on skill-intensive techniques of resource accrual. The regulation of fertility under traditional conditions is based upon a co-evolved psychology and physiology where adjustments of...

David Lam is Professor of Economics and Director of the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. Kermyt Anderson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. Support for this research was provided by the U. S. National Institutes of Health (NICHD), Grant Number R01HD039788, and th...

We present a biosocial model of human male parental care that allows male parental al-locations to be influenced not only by changes in the fitness (welfare) of the recipient off-spring, but also by their effects on the man's relationship with the child's mother. The model recognizes four classes of relationships between males and the children they...

In this article we present a biosocial model of human male parental care that allows re-lationship (mating) effort to influence male parental allocations. The model recognizes four classes of relationships between men and the children they parent: genetic off-spring of current mates (combined relationship and parental effort), genetic offspring of...

In this article we present a biosocial model of human male parental care that allows relationship (mating) effort to influence male parental allocations. The model recognizes four classes of relationships between men and the children they parent: genetic offspring of current mates (combined relationship and parental effort), genetic offspring of pr...

Abstract Life history theory predicts that increased extrinsic mortality will lead to greater engagement,in HIV/AIDS risk behaviors. This model puts a novel perspective on HIV/AIDS risk behaviors, suggesting that mortality is both a cause the patterning of sexual behaviors as well as an outcome of such behaviors. To test this prediction, I examine...