The evolution of different life history strategies and thus different ageing patterns essentially depends on the nature of the underlying trade-offs between survival and reproduction. To fully comprehend ageing, we need to understand these trade-offs.

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By European standards, consensual first unions have been rare in Romania, and they remain so even though their incidence has increased by a factor of almost five since the early 1960s. Rates of conversion of consensual unions into marriages have been cut in half over the same four decades or so,...

The paper provides an extensive descriptive analysis and comparison of recent trends in union formation and fertility in Bulgaria and Russia. The analysis is based on data from the Generation and Gender Surveys (GGS) carried out in 2004. We generate a large number of single- and multi-decrement...

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Hamilton quantified the force of selection on an age-specific mutation. Hamilton’s indicators of the age-specific force of selection always decline with age. This result is of profound importance to the theory of the evolution of senescence. Here I derive alternative indicators within...

Period fertility rates fell to previously unseen low levels in a large number of countries beginning in the early 1990s. The persistence of Total Fertility Rates under 1.3 raised the possibility of dramatic, rapid population aging as well as population decline. In an analysis of recent trends,...

The paper provides an analysis of divorce risk in first marital unions in Russia, with a major focus on the impact of premarital conception on the stability of subsequent marriage. A number of other predictors are also discussed, including age at first marriage, parity and age of the youngest...

Using data from the first round of the national Gender and Generations Surveys of Russia, Romania, and Bulgaria, and from a similar survey for Hungary, we study rates of entry into marital and non-marital unions and display manifestations of the Second Demographic Transition in these data. The...

Negative senescence is characterized by a decline in mortality with age after reproductive maturity, generally accompanied by an increase in fecundity. Hamilton (1966) ruled out negative senescence: we adumbrate the deficiencies of his model. We review empirical studies of various plants and...