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Ecology, Human Behavioral

Human behavioral ecology (HBE) applies to principles of evolution by natural selection to explain behavioral and cultural diversity in human populations. It explores how features of social and physical environment constrain the suite of behaviors or “strategies” of individuals and applies the logic of optimization to make formal predictions about the conditions that favor or disfavor particular behaviors. The main focus of HBE is to explain behavioral variation within and among populations. Its intellectual forbears include developments in biology (evolutionary biology, animal behavior, population and community ecology, life history theory), anthropology (cultural ecology, hunter-gatherer studies), and economics (microeconomics of consumer choice). Since HBE's formulation in the late 1970s, it has been referred to as human sociobiology, Darwinian anthropology, evolutionary or behavioral ecology, and biocultural and biosocial anthropology. Currently, HBE shares common goals and foundations with evolutionary psychology and cultural transmission theory but differs in specific goals and methods. Initially focused on understanding foraging behavior among hunter-gatherers, HBE has expanded over the past 25 years to cover a wide scope of themes and problems, using a broad range of observational, ethnographic, and experimental methods.

Natural Selection and Behavior

Natural selection will influence the frequency of traits when there is sufficient phenotypic variation in traits across individuals, when such variation is inheritable, and when it has an impact on biological “fitness” or reproductive success, via the ability to differentially survive or reproduce in a specific environment and population. Heritability of traits occurs through genetic transmission from parent to offspring and through individual or social learning of information and behavior. HBE therefore focuses on behavioral and cultural “traits” that are likely to have fitness consequences. These include the suite of foraging, mating, parenting, and costly social behaviors found in all populations. People everywhere in all cultures develop ways to extract resources from their environment; find mates; defend access to resources; protect, feed, and care for offspring; and form and maintain social partners and alliances and must often trade off time and energy among these tasks. While evolution can also occur due to founder effects in small populations, random mutation, and gene flow, only natural selection can produce directional change or complex, adaptive design.

HBE treats observed behaviors or traits of interest (phenotypes) as if they were controlled by a simple genetic system, even though most behaviors are multi-causal and involve networks of many genes and their interaction with stimuli from local environments. Biologist Alan Grafen has referred to this methodological tactic as the “phenotypic gambit.” Behavioral ecologists usually assume that most fitness-related behaviors are sufficiently flexible, and so a safe working assumption is that behaviors can be examined without regard to the particulars of the form of inheritance.

Optimization

Most HBE research employs a hypothetico-deductive methodology, where explicit hypotheses are derived from theoretical models and tested using information collected from fieldwork among living populations. Models are usually mathematical formulations of fundamental adaptive problems. Models balance tractability with realism and specify key relationships among variables believed to best capture the theoretical dynamics of a problem. Two common approaches are optimality models and game-theoretic models. Optimality models examine conditions favoring an optimal behavioral “strategy” from a suite of available strategies, with the goal of maximizing some currency under a set of ecological constraints. The currency may be direct biological fitness, typically measured as the number of children surviving to some later age. The currency is often a proxy of direct fitness, such as foraging efficiency, growth rate, and fertility. While optimality models typically examine costs and benefits from the perspective of a single individual without any reference to what others in the population are doing, the success of strategies in game-theoretic models depends upon the frequency of other strategies in the reference population. For example, a lone cooperator may not fare well in a world populated by defectors.

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