1st Edition

Adaptation and Human Behavior An Anthropological Perspective

By Napoleon Chagnon Copyright 2000
    528 Pages
    by Routledge

    528 Pages
    by Routledge

    This volume presents state-of-the-art empirical studies working in a paradigm that has become known as human behavioral ecology. The emergence of this approach in anthropology was marked by publication by Aldine in 1979 of an earlier collection of studies edited by Chagnon and Irons entitled Evolutionary Biology and Human Social Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective. During the two decades that have passed since then, this innovative approach has matured and expanded into new areas that are explored here.

    The book opens with an introductory chapter by Chagnon and Irons tracing the origins of human behavioral ecology and its subsequent development. Subsequent chapters, written by both younger scholars and established researchers, cover a wide range of societies and topics organ-ized into six sections. The first section includes two chapters that provide historical background on the development of human behavioral ecology and com-pare it to two complementary approaches in the study of evolution and human behavior, evolutionary psychology, and dual inheritance theory. The second section includes five studies of mating efforts in a variety of societies from South America and Africa. The third section covers parenting, with five studies on soci-eties from Africa, Asia, and North America. The fourth section breaks somewhat with the tradition in human behavioral ecology by focusing on one particularly problematic issue, the demographic transition, using data from Europe, North America, and Asia. The fifth section includes studies of cooperation and helping behaviors, using data from societies in Micronesia and South America. The sixth and final section consists of a single chapter that places the volume in a broader critical and comparative context.

    The contributions to this volume demonstrate, with a high degree of theoretical and methodological sophistication--the maturity and freshness of this new paradigm in the study of human behavior. The volume will be of interest to anthropologists and other professions working on the study of cross-cultural human behavior.

    I: Some Statements of Theory; 1: Two Decades of a New Paradigm; 2: Three Styles in the Evolutionary Analysis of Human Behavior; II: Mating; 3: Polygyny, Family Structure, and Child Mortality; 4: Paternal Investment and Hunter-Gatherer Divorce Rates; 5: Fertility, Offspring Quality, and Wealth in Datoga Pastoralists; 6: Manipulating Kinship Rules; 7: Physical Attractiveness, Race, and Somatic Prejudice in Bahia, Brazil; III: Parenting; 8: Parental Investment Strategies among Aka Foragers, Ngandu Farmers, and Euro-American Urban-Industrialists; 9: Parenting Other Men’s Children; 10: Female-biased Parental Investment and Growth Performance among the Mukogodo; 11: Why Do the Yomut Raise More Sons than Daughters?; 12: The Grandmother Hypothesis and Human Evolution; IV: The Demographic Transition; 13: An Adaptive Model of Human Reproductive Rate Where Wealth Is Inherited; 14: The Evolutionary Economics and Psychology of the Demographic Transition to Low Fertility; 15: Sex, Wealth, and Fertility; 16: To Marry Again or Not; V: Sociality; 17: Effects of Illness and Injury on Foraging among the Yora and Shiwiar; 18: Reciprocal Altruism in Yanomamö Food Exchange; 19: Reciprocal Altruism and Warfare; 20: The Emergence and Stability of Cooperative Fishing on Ifaluk Atoll; VI: Conclusion; 21: Twenty Years of Evolutionary Biology and Human Social behavior

    Biography

    Napoleon Chagnon