IGERT Program in Evolutionary Modeling

Warfare is commonly viewed as a force driving the process of aggregation of initially independent villages into larger and more complex political units that started several thousand years ago and quickly lead to the appearance of chiefdoms, states, and empires. Here, we build a spatially explicit agent-based model of the emergence of early complex societies via warfare.

The talk will present a general theory of growth and aging, and then extends it to examine the life history implications of the skills-based foraging niche, characteristic of the human evolutionary past. The theory proposes that the role of knowledge, skill acquisition and transfers in determining economic productivity and resource distribution is the distinctive feature of the traditional human ecology that is responsible for the evolution of prolonged development, menopause and a 70 year lifespan.

Demographic transitions in our species history signal important changes in the social and economic organization of populations. This presentation examines causal factors that may influence these changes in population size and dynamics in two recent demographic shifts: the Neolithic Demographic Transition (NDT) and the Current Demographic Transition.

Populations unable to evolve to selectively favored states are constrained. A genetic constraint occurs when heritable variation in selectively favored directions is absent (“absolute constraint”) or present but small (“quantitative constraint”). Quantitative—unlike absolute—constraints are presumed surmountable given time. This ignores that a population might go extinct before reaching the favored state, in which case demography effectively converts a quantitative into an absolute constraint.