HUMBIO 2B

Culture, Evolution, and Society

Genetic Drift

• random change in allele frequency overtime due to chance

• Alleles drift independently

Genetic Ancestry

• Genetic similarities (estimated from SNPs)

• understand geographic origins + how humans adapted overtime

• neutral measurement because it relies on biological data

Human characteristics with Human dietary breadth

Tools & Technology: we can eat some food that we would otherwise be hard to catch or to digest

Intentional teaching: Young members of the group can practice identifying edible species or using tools effectively, with experts to guide them

Local Culture: We develop norms around eating that help the community maintain a safe and nutritious diet

Behavioral flexibility: We can find food anywhere, we adjust to ecological conditions that affect food options

Communication & Cooperative behavoir:

Methods of obtaining food

Farming crops

Foraging

Herding

Trading

Domestication

Definition: full blown agriculture

Effects food: changing species (deliberately or not) such that they are less able to live in the wild and are more dependent on humans

• less adaptive/maladaptive under natural (wild) conditions

• traits can change through natural selection or artificial selection

Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNPs)

Definition: single change in a base (4-5 million SNPs)

Affects on individuals: genetic diversity

Hypo descent

Definition: one distant ancestor determines classification

Hyper descent

Definition: Ancestry is gradually diluted as “mixing” increases

Recent African Origin hypothesis

Homo sapiens evolved in Africa then migrated across the globe

1) One wave 2MYA homo Erectus left Africa to Eurasia

2) ancestor leave and neanderthals, Denisovans spread through Eurasia around 1MYA

3) Homo sapiens spread into Eurasia around 50,000 years ago

*direct ancestors of Homo sapiens evolved into Homo sapiens

*Homo sapiens started in Western Eurasia/Middle East → migrated and mixed with Neanderthals → went to Southeast Asia/oceania → mixed with Denisovians

Denisovans

An extinct group of archaic humans who lived across Asia from about 200,000 to 30,000 years ago

Types of Racism

Institutionalized

Personally Mediated

Internalized

Nixtamalization

soaking maize in alkaline solution

Farming

moderately productive, predictable environments where diet specialization is not risky (rich flat land between rivers)

*best productive environment and low variablility

Foraging

searching/gathering food → less predictable but productive environments where broad and flexible diet allows adjustment to conditions

*always productive (more time taking than building)

*always something growing

Herding

bringing animals together → predictable but unproductive (cold desert) where animals turn unpalatable grasses into meat & milk

*best when there’s nothing to eat (plant wise) → animals eat what we can’t break down, low variability

Human Ultra socialism

• kinship

• reciprocity

*Foraging communities

Social problems of foragers

Food sharing in central location (around the fire)

Hunting large game

child rearing

How foragers formed community

• Partnerships and gift exchange across camps

• trading networks

• large scale communal hunts

Altruism

willingness to pay a personal cost to benefit others

Third party punishment

The willingness to punish norm violators may be another evolved cognitive adaptation of humans

ex. union walk out, standing up for injustice

Third party punishment sustainability

• increase penalties imposed on non-cooperation

• increase the chance that violators of norms will be detected

Christopher Boehm: Reverse dominance hierarchy

Hunter-gatherers use a variety of means to counter attempts to take power, including ostracism and killing

Contemporary Foraging societies

Egalitarian: believe that all people are fundamentally equal and should receive equal rights, treatment, and opportunities

*Partnership + gift exchange

*trading networks

*large scale communal hunts

*indirect reciprocity

*gossip → reputation

*third party punishment → willingness to punish those who violate norms or unwilling to share resources

*can limit individuals power through cooperation coalition

Flat hierarchies

minimal layers/little complexity

Ostracisms

Purposely excluding/banishing someone out of a social group

Leadership

• Persuasion

• coalition-building

• provision of the common good

Hierarchy

• rankings

• status

• power

Complexity

people do different/specialized things and depend on each other

Surplus + social complexity

• allows people to specialize in activities other than agriculture (pottery/textiles)

• trade

• larger + interconnected societies

Early State features

• territorially define, independent units

• large populations

• centralized government

• specialized, differentiated institutions

  • military (defense + conquest)

  • bureaucracy (tax collection)

  • state religion (legitimize state rules

• social stratification

  • distinction between rulers + ruled

• occupational specialization

  • three classes (nobility/priests, merchants/artisans, peasants), extensive use of slavery

• legitimacy based on common ideology

Darwin evolution

Argued that species change over time by natural selection and that modern species descend from earlier ones (common descent)

Three conditions of natural selection

Variation: traits vary among species

Inheritance: offspring resemble their parents

Difference in reproductive fitness (competition): chance of surviving and reproducing depends on an individuals traits

Gap in Darwin’s theory

Darwin doesn’t know how inheritance works

Hominids

great apes

Hominins

Humans plus ancestors after the split from chimpanzees (6.5MYA)

Homo sapiens

Anatomically modern humans

Archaic Humans

extinct Homo sapiens

What we share with other species (sustain cooperation)

• kinship: helping relatives

• Reciprocity: returning favors

Mechanisms to sustain large corporations

• indirect reciprocity and reputation: help is returned by third parties who know your record

• Gossip: spreads reputation information

• Prosocial sentiments: fairness, empathy, altruism: willingness

Plato’s theory of form

objects in the real world are copies of som ideal form → there’s an unchanging ideal of any object (species) and that examples in the real world are copies of this Platonic ideal

Jean-Baptiste Larmark

Complexifying force: organisms become more compl ex overtime

Charles Lyell

Uniformitarianism: the natural process that shaped the world in the past are present today

Gradualism: most changes in nature occurred slowly

Thomas Malthus

The struggle for resources → small populations expand rapidly they’ll exhaust their resources

*carrying capacity

Multi regional Hypothesis

Homo Erectus migrates, groups evolve into homo sapiens mostly separately

*Homo erectus left Africa roughly 2 million years ago, different populations across Africa, Europe, and Asia evolved locally and simultaneously into modern Homo sapiens.

Darwins theory of Pangenesis

“gemmules” were supposedly shed by all the different organs and contained the information needed to copy themselves in the offspring

Denisovans

Found in SE Asia + Oceania

→ after Homo sapiens evolved interbred with neanderthals in the middle east

Vittrup Man

• 3300-3100BCE (5KYA)

• was in a Bog (marshy places with moss…anaerobic and acidic)

• killed by being hit in the head with a ballot (violent death) → artifact found next to him

• found in Vittrup Denmark

• DNA suggests that he has a northern ancestry than he was found

• stable isotopes in teeth revealed his diet at different

  • found he was fishing in the north and farmed in Denmark

• dental plaque had protein that showed the food he ate (marine + farm)

Abu Hureyra (cite)

• foraging to farming on the Euphrates

• Sedentary Hunter gatherers (11.5K-10K BP)

• early farmers 9.5k to 7k BP

• drastic reduction in diversity of plant foods

  • skeletons show evidence of anemia and malnutrition: reduced growth rate and final height, weak teeth

• Big toe bent at a 90degreee angle (women)

  • on the ground grinding the grains

  • deformity in the lower back

  • broken teeth bc broken stone were in the grain from grinding

• weaving arose

  • damaged teeth bc they would run them through their teeth

  • pottery

    • cavities rose bc you could cook the grains → sticky releasing starch sticking to peoples teeth

• more infant skeletons → higher birth rates but more child mortality

Catalhoyuk

• greater front to back street on thigh bone → more walking and running

• herding animals across a wider range because local farm animals were decreasing

  • dry climate

  • overexploitation of farming lands

• unrelated household units → bonds were formed from shared living and labor

• human feces found on house grounds→ lived in close contact with the animals

• lots of non fatal head trauma

  • females suffered more

Conflict vs. Functionalist (state development)

Conflict: State emerges out of inequality; mechanism to benefit elites

Functionalist: State emerges to solve societal problems; they are better off with it than without the state

Coefficient of Coincidence (CoC)

observed doubled cross overs/expected double crossovers

• If expected is not given to you

  • r₁(recombination frequency of interval 1) x r₂ (recombination frequency of interval 2) x N (total number of offspring)

Timeline

250MYA (Rise of Mammals) → 60-80MYA (rise of primates: large brains, color vision+visual acuity; less reliance on smell than other mammals) → 66MYA (Astroid extinction) → 40MYA (old world primate diverges) → 18MYA (Great Ape divergence)→ ^MYA (last common ancestor of humans and chimps)

Java man

2MYA SE Asia indonesia

tchadensis

Skull found in Chad 7MYA

Laetoli Footprints (Luci)

Found in Tanzania 3.7 MYA first discovery of bipedal species/upright walker

Petrous

most DNA preservation

Admixture in Pacific Islands

• Polynesians spread eastward (island hopping)

• hints of Native American culture within Pacific Islanders

Circumscription

*State development

Robert Gannero: all early states arose of fertile natural land that is delimited by natural barriers

• limited fertile land

• surrounding it there is a natural barrier [unproductive land] (desert/sea)

• then you get population pressure (competition)

• warfare (losers can’t leave→become subjects)

Grain hypothesis

*State development

• cereal farming

• they are able to ration store → extraction + tax collection

• Visible, Assessable, Divisible/rationable, determinate growth + simultaneous ripening, storable, transportable

Industrialization

• gradual transformation → much faster (200-250 years) [1750-1830]

• no clean break btw agrarian and industrial societies

• a technological change

• triggers major social change

Industrial Revolution

Wave of technological advances and organizational changes starting in BRITAIN I the eighteenth century, which transformed an agrarian and craft based economy into an industrial and commercial economy

• An economic change, with social, political and intellectual implications

• Two forces lie at the heart of this change: technology and energy

Technology

Improves productivity (how much output you can get with one unit of input)

Culture

• scientific ideas of the enlightenment

• hard work and patience as values of the Protestant Revolution

Institutions

England was one of the few countries with a constrained state that respected property rights, which encouraged innovation

Luck

European colonize the Americas which provided the resources used to fuel industrialization

Britain takes advantage because it has coal

Implications (Short-run)

• Unhealthy work environments and work conditions

• Industrial pollution

  • “smoke plague”

• urbanization leads to crowding and transmission of communicable disease

• Rising wages increase caloric intake

  • high infant mortality rate

Implications (Medium to long run)

• wages keep on rising

• governments begin to introduce public health measures and addresses poor living and working conditions

  • ending child labor

Demographic transition (theory)

A gradual shift from the high level of fertility and mortality characteristics of agricultural societies to the low levels of fertility and mortality characteristic of industrialized societies

*first described by demographers in the 20s-30s at a time of steep fertility declines in W. Europe and US

Change from DT

• global average life expectancy more than doubled

• Since the 50’s the global average number of children born per woman has been cut in half, from 5 to 2.5

• global population growth ‘exploded’ and is only now setting back to pre 50’s levels

Stage 1: Pre-transition (DT)

• birth and death rates are high

• little to no ‘natural increase’

Stage 2: Mortality transition (DT)

• death rates begin to fall

• rapid population growth

Stage 3: Fertility transition (DT)

• birth rates sustained decline

• population growth begins to slow

Stage 4: post transition (DT)

• birth and death rates are low

• little to no ‘natural increase’

Is there a stage 5 of DT

• some believe that the theory didn’t account for the sustained low fertility and the potential for long term population decline occurring now in dozens of countries

• Others argue current trends are just part of the fluctuations around a low level of growth, and fertility will not continue dropping indefinitely

Data for DT

• “crude” rates = demographic rates that don’t account for age

• fertility rate and life expectancy are calculated Ising life tables (require more data)

DT fast and slow

• countries that started DT later also went through it faster

• transitions were imported/imposed through rapid interventions in medicine and family planning

• these countries may have benefited in learning from early countries experience, but often had little time to adjust to dramatic changes in population size and structure

State Capacity

The ability of the state to effectively implement policies and achieve its goals

• protect citizens against internal and external threats

• encourage economic activity

High capcity

strong state

• allows states to perform more functions

Low capacity

weak state

Legal capcity

ability to enforce rules across the territory

Fiscal capacity

ability to raise tax revenues from the economy to implement policies

Collective capacity

ability to provide public goods like health and education

Information capacity

ability of states to collect and standardize information about the populations and its practices

Public goods

• not excludable (clean air)

• non rivalrous

Externality (market failure)

situation where the action of one individual either benefits/hurts those around them

• Harmful side effects imposed on others without their consent

• Beneficial side effects that reward or improve the situation of bystanders

Regulation of monopolies

Natural Monopolies

One company takes over

• utilities

Activist functions

To drive, impede, or shape social, political, economic, or environmental change by taking direct action rather than passively discussing problems

State Functions

State scope

State capacity inputs

Public spending, size of bureacrcy, resources at its disposal, education and qualifications of government employees

• complications:

  • such measures partly reflect state capacity and partly state scope

  • not all states want a large public sector

  • some input measures, such as # of bureaucrats fail to measure how well bureaucrats do their job ( even if they intend to work at all)

State capacity outputs

Services provided, metrics of performance in different domains, such as education or health

• Complications:

  • Measure based on output may depend on more than state capacity

    • ex. educational outcomes may depend more on parents income and SES than state intervention

State capacity Procedures

Impartiality of bureaucracy or, conversely measures of dysfunction such as corruption

• problems:

  • procedural measures are base on perceptions, which can be biased

  • an impartial bureaucracy is not necessarily an effective one

Government effectiveness

A mix of procedural and output measures, which additionally accounts for autonomy the bureaucracy. Also based on perceptions, aggregated from many existing data sources

Age structure in DT

Counterintuitive: Mortality decline initially makes the population larger and younger

• Larger: The population is losing fewer people than it did before (subtracting slowly)

• Younger: decreases infant and childhood mortality tend to be most dramatic

Mortality decline

Fertility decline kick starts population aging

• Later stages of mortality decline also make the population older

• But fertility transition plays a key role in the relative proportion of youth vs. elderly

Other patterns with pyramids

• Migration

• Skewed sex/gender ratios

Migration reflected on pyramids

• relative size of the migrant population

• selectivity by age/sex/both

Skewed