IGERT Program in Evolutionary Modeling

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.

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.

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.

Insofar as participation in a religious system provides a form of reputation that facilitates interpersonal interactions among people who are otherwise strangers, this benefit is jeopardized by free-riders who are not true adherents to the moral and belief system of the religion. This presentation will build upon the work of Sosis, Neiman, and Boone by considering how the practice of pilgrimage is a costly signal of religious adherence, for pilgrims typically engage in a variety of costly behaviors that affirm their commitment to the religion while operating as a deterrent to cheaters.

Darwinian models of cultural evolution can be classified in three types. Firstly, cultural evolution may be viewed as a domain apart from biology, whereby cultural traits evolve by Darwinian selection. Alternately, cultural evolution may affect biological evolution via cultural traits that influence individual reproductive success. Finally, in coevolutionary models, culture and biology may be intricately linked, whereby selection in one affects evolutionary outcomes in the other.