Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Arts and Humanities
Ratio versus difference optimization in human behavior
Published: 2023-10-27
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Models of optimization have played an important role in the fields of evolution as well as economics. In the classical models of optimization, some tend to maximize the ratio of returns to investment and others tend to maximize the net benefit or the difference between the two. Clarity in the contextual appropriateness of the ratio model versus difference model came very recently. This clarity [...]
Global research priorities for historical ecology to inform conservation
Published: 2023-10-26
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Historical ecology draws on a broad range of information sources and methods to provide insight into ecological and social change, especially over the past ~12,000 years. While its results are often relevant to conservation and restoration, insights from its diverse disciplines, environments, and geographies have frequently remained siloed or underrepresented, restricting their full potential. [...]
Mobilising central bank digital currency to bend the curve of biodiversity loss
Published: 2023-10-21
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Humanity is at a critical juncture. Despite our efforts to set targets and goals, biodiversity and climate are both changing rapidly, pushing us towards a biosphere our species has not known. To solve this problem one view is that we need transformational change of the economic paradigm, but that might be more an ideal than pragmatic. A new idea could be to take inspiration from recent [...]
Biogeographical distributions of trickster animals
Published: 2023-07-03
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Human language encompasses almost endless potential for meaning and folklore can theoretically incorporate themes beyond time and space. However, actual distributions of the themes are not always universal and their constraints remain unclear. Here, we specifically focused on zoological folklore and aimed to reveal what restricts the distribution of trickster animals in folklore. We applied the [...]
Queering ecology: (Re)Constructing ecology as a home to better understand the social-ecological pressures of wildlife
Published: 2023-06-01
Subjects: Arts and Humanities
Homes are intimate spaces where many bodies come together in space and time to deeply learn and understand the many processes that have created one another. Ecology, the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment, is based on the study of a home. Yet, ecologists are trained in patriarchal, heteronormative, and otherwise Western articulations and understandings of nature [...]
Disentangling human nature: Anthropological reflections on evolution, zoonoses and ethnographic investigations
Published: 2023-02-11
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Human nature is a puzzling matter that must be analysed through a holistic lens. In this commentary, I foray into anthropology's biosocial dimensions to underscore that human relations span from microorganisms to global commodities. I argue that the future of social-cultural anthropology depends on the integration of evolutionary theory for its advancement. Ultimately, since the likelihood of [...]
The March of the Human Footprint
Published: 2022-09-29
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Human influence is driving planetary change, often in undesirable and unsustainable ways. Recent advances enabled us to measure changes in humanity’s footprint on Earth annually from 2000 – 2019 with a nine-fold improvement in spatial resolution over previous efforts. We found that earlier studies seriously under-estimated the magnitude, extent, and rate of change in the human footprint. [...]
Living Through Multispecies Societies: Approaching the Microbiome with Imanishi Kinji
Published: 2022-06-12
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Other Philosophy, Philosophy
Recent research about the microbiome points to a picture in which we, humans, are living through nature, and nature itself is living in us. Our bodies are hosting – and depend on – the multiple species that constitute human microbiota. This article will discuss current research on the microbiome through the ideas of Japanese ecologist Imanishi Kinji (1902-1992). First, some of Imanishi’s key [...]
Rates of ecological knowledge learning in Pemba, Tanzania: Implications for childhood evolution.
Published: 2022-04-23
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Humans live in diverse, complex niches where survival and reproduction are conditional on the acquisition of knowledge. Humans also have long childhoods, spending more than a decade before they become net producers. Whether the time needed to learn has been a selective force in the evolution of long human childhood is unclear, because there is little comparative data on the [...]
Female bone physiology resilience in a past Polynesian Outlier community
Published: 2022-02-27
Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Arts and Humanities, Biological and Physical Anthropology, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, Other Arts and Humanities, Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures, Pacific Islands Languages and Societies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Remodelling is a fundamental biological process involved in the maintenance of bone physiology and function. We know that a range of health and lifestyle factors can impact this process in living and past societies, but there is a notable gap in bone remodelling data for populations from the Pacific Islands. We conducted the first examination of femoral cortical histology in 69 individuals from [...]
Impact of Infectious Disease on Humans and Our Origins
Published: 2021-06-18
Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Arts and Humanities, Bacteriology, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biological Phenomena, Cell Phenomena, and Immunity, Cell and Developmental Biology, Cell Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetic Phenomena, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, Life Sciences, Medical Biochemistry, Medical Cell Biology, Medical Genetics, Medical Immunology, Medical Microbiology, Medical Molecular Biology, Medical Pathology, Medical Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Molecular Biology, Molecular Genetics, Pathogenic Microbiology, Pharmacology, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Virology
On May 16, 2020, the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny organized the symposium “Impact of Infectious Disease on Humans and Our Origins”. The symposium aimed to gather experts on infectious diseases in one place and discuss the interrelationship between different pathogens and humans in an evolutionary context. The talks discussed topics including SARS-CoV-2, dengue and [...]
Global economic and diet transitions drove Latin American and Caribbean forest change during the first decade of the century.
Published: 2021-03-31
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) contain more tropical high-biodiversity forest than the remaining areas of the planet combined, yet experienced more than a third of global deforestation during the first decade of the 21st century. While drivers of forest change occur at multiple scales, we examined forest change at the municipal and national scales integrated with global processes such as [...]