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18. Sociality, Food Sharing, and the Evolution of Life Histories

Chapter of: Human Evolutionary Demography(pp. 401–422)

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Title18. Sociality, Food Sharing, and the Evolution of Life Histories
ContributorRonald Lee(author)
Carl Boe(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0251.18
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0251/chapters/10.11647/obp.0251.18
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
CopyrightRonald Lee; Carl Boe;
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2024-06-14
Long abstractLife history theory has focused on the life cycle tradeoffs faced by individuals who are constrained by the energy they can forage for themselves at each age. However, humans are deeply social and adults transfer food to children for many years, freeing them from this energy constraint but also bringing the risk that parental death could entail the death of all dependent offspring. Multiple simultaneously dependent offspring also bring a family life cycle squeeze in which dependency ratio doubles. Food sharing and alloparenting ameliorate both problems, providing life insurance and smoothing the life cycle squeeze, while permitting humans to rely on food resources that would be too uncertain for isolated individuals. Food sharing and intergenerational transfers in turn affect the way natural selection shapes life histories. We use microsimulations to study evolution of life histories. Births inherit the mother’s genome subject to mutations. Individuals live under different social arrangements and forage with productivity depending on population density. Natural selection on life histories occurs. We examine the way the size and relatedness of sharing group arrangements alter the evolution of life history traits through mutation and natural selection. We consider which social arrangements, with their corresponding evolved life histories, are most successful in a group competition where all face the same density constraint. There is a tradeoff between costs and benefits of sharing. We find that intermediate levels are most successful, unless childhood conditions strongly influence later life productivity.
Page rangepp. 401–422
Print length22 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Ronald Lee

(author)
Emeritus Professor of Demography and Economics at University of California, Berkeley
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9755-0436

Ronald Lee is an Emeritus Professor of Demography and Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, with a 1967 MA in Demography from Berkeley and a 1971 Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard. His interest in intergenerational transfers in contemporary human societies led him to begin working on evolutionary theories of aging, mathematical life history theory and the evolution of social organization across species.

Carl Boe

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9110-9356

Carl Boe received his MA in Statistics in 1989 and his PhD in Demography in 1994, both from the University of California at Berkeley. Interest in biodemography led to post-doctoral study at the University of California, Davis. His specialties are mathematical demography, stochastic forecasting, and programming.

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