Fri Nov 13, 2015 4:40 pm
At the bottom of the article:
However, temperature probably has a lot less effect on when people have children than it did decades ago, when fewer people had air conditioner units and more people worked outside, said Kevin Bakker, a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current study.
Instead, factors such as the type of work people do have probably had more of an effect on decreasing the U.S. birth rate, Bakker said.
Barreca agrees with this assessment.
"Temperature's role has probably been pretty negligible compared to other things like access to birth control (and) increasing labor opportunities for women ... but it would suggest that, if anything, it's adding on to the other things going on," he said.
Of course, modern humans and their close relatives faced extinction more than once over the last several ice age cycles, so I guess cool weather has it's sexual limits too!