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Life history evolution: a biological meta-theory for the social sciences Steven C. Hertler full chapter instant download
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life h i stor y e vol u t ion
A Biological Meta-Theory for the Social Sciences
Steven C. Hertler,
Aurelio José Figueredo,
Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre,
Heitor B. F. Fernandes
and Michael A. Woodley of Menie
Life History Evolution
Steven C. Hertler
Aurelio José Figueredo
Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre
Heitor B. F. Fernandes
Michael A. Woodley of Menie
v
vi Contents
Epilogue 345
Index 403
List of Figures
Chapter 3
Fig. 1 Conceptual schematics for three major symbiotic
portmanteau assemblages 51
Chapter 6
Fig. 1 Environmental carrying capacity in relation to logistic
population growth 96
Chapter 10
Fig. 1 World map of consanguineous unions produced
by A. H. Bittles and M. Black 166
Fig. 2 World map of family organization produced
by the University of Toronto 167
Chapter 16
Fig. 1 Real Median Household Income by Race and Hispanic
Origin: 1967–2014 281
ix
List of Tables
Chapter 11
Table 1 Raw CPEM bivariate correlations 193
Table 2 CPEM first (lag = 1) serial spatial autocorrelations 194
Table 3 Correlations among CPEM first (lag = 1)
serial spatial autocorrelations 194
xi
CHAPTER 1
Some social scientists had gone as far as Comte,5 absorbing the gen-
eral positivist doctrine wherein social science was grounded in natu-
ral science. Nevertheless, they were far from genuinely embracing E. O.
Wilson’s call to consilience, a form of scientific convergence wherein social
science is reducible to natural science.
It is not to say that what may be regarded as classical evolutionary the-
ory had nothing to say on the matter of cultural and personal differences,
but only that such knowledge was not easily accessible, sharp or unified,
leading many social scientists to regard evolution only as a useful backdrop.
For in truth, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, evolution slowly enlarged
its explanatory sphere to include the domains customarily reserved to
the social sciences. It was during this fecund time when cooperation was
explained via inclusive fitness6 (Hamilton 1964) and reciprocal altruism7
(Trivers 1971). Also within these decades, a rationale for sexual reproduc-
tion was expressed in the form of Muller’s Ratchet8 (Gabriel et al. 1993),
a foundation for group selection was laid through the selfish gene,9 and an
explanation of senescence and death was articulated in The Disposable Soma
Hypothesis10 (Kirkwood 1977; Kirkwood and Austad 2000).
In these same progressive decades, E. O. Wilson and Robert H.
MacArthur (1967) were terrorizing the flora and fauna of small islands
within the Florida Keys, tarping and gassing entire ecosystems in an effort
4 S. C. HERTLER ET AL.
to learn about migration and the growth of populations. From this work
on island biogeography (MacArthur and Wilson 2001; Losos and Ricklefs
2009), combined with input from Dobzhansky (1950), Pianka (1970),
Roff (2002), Charnov (1993), Stearns (1992), Harvey and Clutton-Brock
(1985), came Life History Theory, an evolutionary framework immediately,
urgently, palpably, directly, and compellingly relevant to the social sciences
and their shared mission to explain human nature and society.
Life history evolutionary theory remains obscure enough for a
synopsis to be required even within some biological and evolutionary
journals and books. Life history evolution is considered by some to be
a sub-discipline or mid-level theory (Buss) within evolutionary biology.
Beyond situating it thus, there have been many approaches to its descrip-
tion. Reznick (2014; p. 268) describes life history as “a composite of
all the variables that contribute to the way in which an organism prop-
agates itself”; Flatt and Heyland (2011) style life history as the unfixed
journey between egg and corpse; Schechter and Francis (2010) explain life
history as a kind of developmental biography of organisms; Braendle et al.
(2011) explain that life history evolution measures the variability in the
trade-offs between somatic investment and reproductive investment that
takes place between the start and end of life. From these explanations,
life history evolution can be seen to take shape as a biological theory of
development. In explaining life history theory, it is also customary and
indispensable to describe the seven biodemographic variable sets that are
subsumed within its framework: (1) size at birth, (2) growth pattern, (3)
age and size at maturity, (4) number, size, and sex ratio of offspring, (5)
age-and-size-specific reproductive investments, (6) age-and-size-specific
mortality schedules, (7) length of life (Stearns 1992; Braendle et al.
2011; Hertler 2017). These and other variables were found to cohere as
a complex that varied along a continuum. Some organisms rush through
life, investing in quantity of offspring and speed of intergenerational
turnover, whereas other organisms mature, mate, and age slowly, invest-
ing in bodily maintenance and quality of offspring.
Another useful illustrative approach is to pick contrasting exemplars
along the life history continuum. For these purposes, the elephant and
the mouse are commonly drafted to good effect. The elephant weighs
approximately two hundred pounds at birth, grows slowly, reaches sex-
ual maturity around fourteen years, attains to an adult weight of over
10,000 pounds, has few offspring on which parental care is lavished, and is
long-lived, affording substantial intergenerational overlap and interaction
1 LIFE HISTORY THEORY: AN OVERVIEW IN ABSTRACT 5
brief survey of the author’s life and work, but quickly moves on to treat
those aspects of the author’s work, generally a recurrent theme or over-
arching theory, viewed thereafter in life history perspective. Following
these two introductory parts, chapters conclude with two closing parts,
the first of which includes broad theoretical discussion of the selections
using life history theory, followed by a final section treating necessary
and extant research in support of that perspective. The theoretical dis-
cussions proffered within each chapter’s third part are explicitly seques-
tered from the empirical surveys traduced within each chapter’s fourth
part, allowing us as writers to offer coherent narrative interpretations,
and you as readers to identify those aspects of our interpretation that are
wrought of inference and that which rests on research. Assisted by this
structure, we can, without halter or trace, transform a catalog of facts
into an explanatory vision. Of final note, each of these six sections will be
bound by a meta-narrative, making grand themes and important connec-
tions explicit. There will then be an epilogue reflecting on the book at
the most abstracted level. These latter two features will build coherence,
compensating for the back and forth inherent in this volume, being that
it is organized around featured authors whose work does not reliably
afford treatment of topics and themes in the most strategic order. With
the topic, scope, and structure described, we lastly turn to content, speci-
fying the featured authors and outlining their treatment.
Section I, containing the second, third, and fourth chapters, assem-
bles enduring concepts from three eminent geographers: Ellsworth
Huntington, Alfred Crosby, and Alan Baker. Huntington was a geog-
rapher acutely aware of population differences created as a function of
selection. Huntington wrote of demography as much as geography,
for he understood that non-random migration was as influential as dif-
ferential ecological adaptation. Consistent with a general evolutionary
understanding, populations then change through founding effects and
migration, as much as natural and sexual selection. Though not avail-
able to Huntington who wrote most prolifically in the earliest part of
the twentieth century, life history evolution is indispensable to under-
standing the dynamics of climatically induced evolution across popula-
tions treated, for instance, in The Principles of Human Geography and
The Human Habitat. Crosby, a geographer of a different cast of mind,
established a basis for human social ecology as contained within the phys-
ical and community ecology, a contrast defined and differentiated by
Huntington. Uniquely, Crosby describes assemblages of portmanteau
biotas, a concept recognizing associated microcommunities of animals
10 S. C. HERTLER ET AL.
and plants within which human societies are ensconced, and to which
they respond culturally and evolutionarily. Crosby historically reinterprets
the clash between European and Amerindian populations during the Age
of Exploration through the lens of portmanteau biotas, concepts, and
consequences on which we expand. Lastly, Alan Baker’s work documents
the fulfillment of the Neolithic Revolution with its mature societies rest-
ing on a foundation of staple grain crops. In Studies of Field Systems in
the British Isles, Baker examines agriculture and its laboring class, while
in Man Made the Land, he takes up the social outgrowths of agriculture.
As clear in Baker’s studies of the French and English peasantry, much of
the social changes following from agriculture are corollaries of popula-
tion density. As will be detailed in this fourth chapter, coinciding with
sedentary civilizations, one sees population life history traits changing in
their mean values and lengthening at their extreme tails.
Section II, containing the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters, assem-
bles indispensable concepts from three eminent demographers: Richard
Price, Thomas Robert Malthus, and John Landers. Two centuries ago,
Richard Price assisted in compiling the Northampton Tables, allowing
lives to be insured with probabilistic rationality. This was part of a life’s
work concerning the measurement of mortality risk. Though such early
demographic investigations gained predictive power, explanatory power
lagged behind. Herein we reread Price’s work on mortality risk using
life history evolution, which, after all, is organized around mortality and
longevity, making it an invaluable aid in understanding the actuarial life
table.15 As can only be explained at length, it is apparent that Price, in
measuring mortality, was indirectly measuring life history, and in apply-
ing his researches to life insurance, was in effect originating postmortem
parental care. With eminently unpropitious timing, Malthus wrote of
resource competition just as humans were bursting the bonds of organic
economies; though, with world population increasing sevenfold in the two
hundred odd years since An Essay on the Principle of Population, popu-
lation density and resultant resource competition take on a new impor-
tance. Although the significance of mortality regime has superseded its
overall significance, population density, and the resource competition it
brings, was the variable around which life history theory was originally
constructed. With the coming of density and accompanying competition,
we use life history theory to show how populations change and stratify
as they vie to survive and reproduce. As we argue, the slowing of life his-
tory is a consequence of population density that Malthus could not sus-
pect, but might have appreciated. Finally, Landers is a demographer of
1 LIFE HISTORY THEORY: AN OVERVIEW IN ABSTRACT 11
FLEMING (Hornille):
HORN:
(Katoavat oikealle.)
HERTTUA:
No, Gipfert, sanaakaan viel' ette ole lausunut. Vai sama myös teillä
onko mieli kuin on noiden?
GIPFERT:
HERTTUA ja HERTTUATAR
Kuin?
GIPFERT:
HERTTUA (naurahtaen):
Tämähän on toista!
GIPFERT:
Ken siellä?
Ken hiipii täällä salaurkkija?
Pois, lurjus, piilostas!
(Skalm tulee esille.)
Kuink' uskallatte?
NIILO SKALM:
HERTTUA:
Kuinka?
HERTTUA (nauraen):
Vai niin! siks hätäisenä niin se neito tuolla meit' äsken riensi
vastaan; oikeastaan siis meidän oisi anteeks pyydettävä, kun toisten
rendez-vous'ta häiritsimme. No, unhotettu olkoon tämä! Mutta te
myöskin osaatteko unhottaa, min täällä vahingossa kuulla saitte?
NIILO SKALM:
HERTTUA:
Puhukaa!
NIILO SKALM:
HERTTUATAR:
Ah, niinkö!
NIILO SKALM:
GIPFERT (herttualle):
HERTTUATAR:
Ens kerran intoa ja tulta nään tään kylmän, juron kansan miehissä.
Oi kuinka teille sanoistanne oonkaan ma kiitollinen! Tosiasiaksi tää
muuttaa unelmamme arimmat. (Herttualle) Mun herrani, te samaa
mieltä ootte kai minun kanssani?
HERTTUA:
NIILO SKALM:
Ymmärrän.
HERTTUATAR:
HERTTUA:
Ah, totta voiko olla tämä kaikki? Näin suuri autuus osaks
ihmislapsen maan päällä tulla voiko? Unta eikö tää ihanaa ja
pettäväistä lie? Mut suudelmansa hellät, tuliset nyt polttavathan vielä
huuliani! Näin riutuvaiset lemmenunelmani ne hetken rahtusessa
todeks muutti. Ja — todeks, todeks eikö muuttumassa myös
suomalainen unelmani ole? Tää amuletti herttuattaren sen todeks
vakuuttaa.
Esirippu.
TOINEN NÄYTÖS.
DOZKA (laulaa):
ANNA:
DOZKA:
ANNA (halveksivasti):
DOZKA (loukkaantuneena):
ANNA:
DOZKA:
DOZKA:
Te jotain sanoitteko?
Kuin, neiti?
ANNA:
DOZKA:
En luule.
ANNA:
Vain sotilaita nään siellä liikkuvan; ei messun aika viel' ole käsillä.
ANNA:
Siis lemmityinen, niin
sanoithan, on sulla, pikku
Dozka?
ANNA:
DOZKA:
ANNA (keskeyttäen):
DOZKA:
ANNA:
ANNA:
DOZKA:
ANNA:
DOZKA:
Niin minkä?
DOZKA:
Suosikin ett'
uuden löytänyt on
herttuatar.
ANNA (säpsähtäen):
Sa houritko?
DOZKA:
Kuin? Sitä ettekö te kuullut ole? Kaikkihan vain siitä nyt kuiskii.
ANNA:
DOZKA:
ANNA (kiivaasti):
ANNA:
DOZKA:
Niin, niin, ja kuinka oli saaja tuo — en nimeänsä muistaa jaksa nyt,
niin outoja nuo täkäläiset nimet! — niin, kuinka kiihkeästi suudellut ol'
amulettia tuo suomalainen ja valan vannonut niin tulisen —
ANNA (nousten):
NIILO SKALM:
(Suutelee Annaa.)
NIILO SKALM:
NIILO SKALM:
Kuin?
Sa jotain tiedätkö jo?
ANNA:
A
n
t
a
m
a
s
i
i
s
h
e
r
t
t
u
a
t
t
a
r
e
n
o
n
a
a
r
r
e
t
u
o
?
NIILO SKALM:
ANNA:
Tunnen, tunnen. Mut sano mulle, miksi rinnallas noin kannat sitä?
NIILO SKALM:
ANNA:
Kuin? Aatteen?
NIILO SKALM:
ANNA:
Mitä? Kaksoissisar!
NIILO SKALM:
ANNA:
Ja mikä
tuo aate
sitten on?
NIILO SKALM:
ANNA (katkerasti):
NIILO SKALM:
ANNA:
Kuin? Sa todellako luulet, mun että rinnassain on tilaa muulle kuin
Iemmellemme yksin?
NIILO SKALM:
ANNA:
NIILO SKALM:
ANNA:
Kaksoissisar!
NIILO SKALM:
ANNA:
ANNA:
NIILO SKALM: