Overview

We divide our research and educational efforts into two broad areas:

1. phylogenetic approaches to biological, behavioral and cultural evolution and co-evolution—including studies of cultural transmission
2. analyses of cooperation and conflict in social systems

These are interrelated, and IPEM students will be exposed to both in a coordinated, integrated program. Each Fellow will begin to emphasize one area by the beginning of their Year 2. Student/student and student/faculty interaction will generate many new projects within these areas. Following are descriptions of these two areas, and links to other pages summarizing some foundational projects in each area that are already funded or in advanced planning stages, on which additional IPEM student research can be built.

Area 1: Statistical phylogenetics and cultural transmission: Modeling evolutionary associations and evolutionary change

Over the last two decades biologists and geneticists have produced evolutionary models of cultural transmission and gene-culture evolution and many studies of social learning in animals. Their work has profound implications for understanding social behavior in humans and many other species. Such work demonstrates that culture and social learning have their own evolutionary properties and features, but these are poorly understood and rarely applied by anthropologists, in part because of the mathematical sophistication required to do so. On the other hand, the biologists who have built exciting mathematical models, and who provide cross-species data on social learning and cultural transmission, seldom build upon existing anthropological research or test models in diverse cultural settings. Statistical phylogenetics and cultural transmission are closely related: cultural transmission provides the various mechanisms that underlie the descriptive summaries of relationships provided by phylogenetics. Phylogenetics has traditionally been used to build and assess trees of biological relationship, and our Fellows will become familiar with these approaches. However, we will extend these approaches to human societies, and to societies of other cultural species, by identifying and modeling cultural processes and mechanisms. Modern systematics offers many tools for reconstructing phylogenetic relationships and rigorously testing evolutionary hypotheses. Phylogenetic models can test for evolutionary association between genetically or culturally evolved traits in a way that controls for nonindependence due to shared ancestry. Phylogenetic methods can also shed light on long-standing but as yet untested hypotheses about cultural and bio-cultural evolution, including dispersal events such as the spread of farming. Two of our main goals are to provide IPEM students with the skills needed for phylogenetic analyses of both cultural and biological data, and to give them a deep understanding of the challenging theoretical issues involved in applying such methods to cultural phenomena. Our faculty includes a senior statistical phylogenist in biology (Felsenstein) and another (M. Alfaro) who is developing new methods to account for uncertainty in phylogenetic model choice (see below). Our international collaborators at the Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity (CECD)—Collard (University of British Columbia), Jordan (University of Sheffield), Mace and Shennan (both at University College London)—are world leaders in applying phylogenetic methods to culture, and students so oriented will be placed with them for a term, or over the summer (see Affiliated institutions page). Specific research projects now underway, or in advanced planning, are described below, beginning with projects emphasizing the determination and description of phylogenetic relationships, followed by studies that emphasize modeling the processes of cultural transmission that make these descriptions possible for cultural populations.

Area 2: Behavioral ecology: Modeling conflict and cooperation

The interplay of cooperation and conflict is fundamental to social change, hence is of central concern to both biologists and social scientists. Biologists and social scientists have long approached these questions independently and with little awareness of each other’s concepts, models, and findings. Recent developments make it clear that greater integration of these separate research traditions in an evolutionary framework (e.g., using evolutionary game theory) can lead to substantial progress and new insights. For example, in both human and other societies, reproduction and/or resources are usually distributed unequally. Biologists study this via reproductive skew theory, which emphasizes kinship, concessions and degree of control. Comparable analyses of human societies stress asymmetries in alliances with kin and non-kin, and in control over key resources such as land. Both sets of analyses would benefit from greater use of game theory and agent-based simulation, and integration of biological and social science approaches. Biologists now emphasize reproductive “conflicts of interests” between males and females, even within socially monogamous pairs, and seek explanations based on genetic transmission and Darwinian fitness. Conflicts and power struggles between the sexes also interest anthropologists, but only recently has evolutionary theory been brought to bear upon them. IPEM co-director Smith has used such theory, coupled to social science models such as costly signaling, to understand such phenomena as “wasteful” economic practices and the elaboration of ritual and artistic traditions. We here summarize a few of our many on-going projects in these areas, emphasizing the shared theoretical and methodological tools that are or could be used to analyze biological and cultural evolution.