Differential Fertility and Social Change

The mechanisms through which culture is transmitted are diverse. This dissertation focuses on one type of cultural transmission---that which occurs between parents and children, or analogous processes that lead the attitudes of parents and children to be correlated. When the attitudes transmitted through these mechanisms are correlated with fertility, a fertility linked cultural process is created where the spread of the cultural variant becomes fundamentally tied, at least in some part, to the fecundity of individuals who hold that attitude. This dissertation focuses on the micro and macroevolutionary consequences of these processes through three substantive chapters. Chapter 1 examines this theory of differential fertility in finer detail, and examines some macroevolutionary consequences of fertility-linked cultural traits. Chapter 2 is an empirical chapter examining the role that fertility differentials have player in trends in attitudes towards abortion in the United States. I find evidence that fertility differentials have played a role in shaping longitudinal trends in attitudes related to abortion, with the comparatively high fertility of `pro-life' individuals leading population level attitudes towards abortion to be more restrictive than they would otherwise be given no fertility difference. The final chapter simulates the process by which individuals have children and those children inherit attitudes from their parents at a particular rate using a computational simulation. Future research on public opinion and cultural change should properly account for fertility differences when examining longitudinal changes in fertility correlated attitudes.