How the lives of mothers matter to offspring survival in wild primates
A new research paper by Matthew Zipple and coworkers looks at the impact of maternal mortality on offspring survival across seven species of wild primates: “...
All posts tagged with life history
Link: Current thinking on the evolutionary history of menopause
The evolutionary history of menopause in humans has been one of the longest-standing areas of research interest in life history evolution. One of the big ide...
Twins from an adaptive point of view
The biological anthropologist Rebecca Sear looks at the evolution of human twinning in a post for This View of Life: “Solving the Evolutionary Puzzle of Twin...
Notable: Female chimpanzees eat more meat when pregnant
Notable: O’Malley, R. C., Stanton, M. A., Gilby, I. C., Lonsdorf, E. V., Pusey, A., Markham, A. C., & Murray, C. M. (2016). Reproductive state and rank i...
Everything Neandertal is not bad
This is not a bad story about Neandertals by Melissa Hogenboom: “What Neanderthals’ healthy teeth tell us about their minds”. It’s an overview of what scient...
The developmental obstetrical dilemma
Alik Huseynov and colleagues have a data-rich paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examining age-related changes in the human pelvis:...
Notable: Gorilla and chimpanzee niche partitioning and life history
Notable paper: Macho GA, Lee-Thorp JA. (2014). Niche Partitioning in Sympatric Gorilla and Pan from Cameroon: Implications for Life History Strategies and fo...
Weaning a Neandertal
Last week, Nature published a paper by Christine Austin and colleagues, in which they developed a new approach to understand how breastfeeding affects the el...
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy interview
Eric Michael Johnson has posted a wonderful and wide-ranging interview with Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: “Raising Darwins Consciousness: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on the Evo...
Membership has its privileges
A new paper in PNAS by Erik Trinkaus covers the mortality patterns of old versus young adults in Neandertals, early modern humans in the Levant and early Upp...
Questioning the "evolution of an underclass"
A little life history theory can be a dangerous thing. Case in point: “Die young, live fast: The evolution of an underclass.” The article discusses correlati...
Bioethics pair
A pair of articles in my browser tabs refer to bioethics.
Human lifespans have not been constant for the last 2000 years
Few things are worse than a skeptic sloppy about checking his facts. For example, the “Bad Science” feature of LiveScience claims that we’re not getting any ...
Bigger brains, more cancer?
Rachael Rettner reports on a hypothesis that human cancer risk may be a side-effect of brain evolution. The hypothesis emerges from studies of gene expressio...
Worm longevity and the germline
Nicholas Wade writes about experiments that link germline gene regulation to life extension in C. elegans:
A Snowdrift game version of hunting
I want to run through some examples of how we can apply game theory to consider hunting decisions in human groups. First, I describe a simple Snowdrift model...
Snowdrift games, cooperation, and "tragedy of the commune"
It’s the second day of June, which means it’s a good time to consider snowdrifts. OK, maybe not – but at least we’re far enough from ...
Neandertal longevity and pulp cavities
Rachel Caspari has been doing some amazing work with micro-CT scans of Neandertal teeth. The work got profiled this week by Elizabeth Culotta in the Science ...
Live fat die young, bearwise
This story describes research on the longevity and maturation of wild bears who have invaded urban habitat in Nevada:
Life history and disease in Tasmanian devils
The keywords to the article include, “carnivorous marsupial” and “precocious breeding.” What better teaser could you possibly hope for?
Mechanisms of development and body size
I'm just doing some background reading about the body size of pygmies (for both obvious and not-so-obvious reasons) and I thought it worth making a note of ...
Hunter-gatherer mortality
Kim Hill and colleagues (2007) report in the current Journal of Human Evolution on the mortality profile of recent Hiwi hunter-gatherers. Here is their abst...
How modern is "modern tooth development"?
Regular readers of the blog will remember previous occasions when I have written about dental development in fossil humans. I am by no means an expert on th...
Family size and lifespan
After the post about education and lifespan, I noticed a different story about how large families reduce the lifespans of parents:
Aging, telomeres, cancer and body mass
FuturePundit points me to a study of telomerase expression in mice. Here's the abstract:
Pregnancy loss in wild baboons
I ran across this new paper by Jacinta Beehner and colleagues, which has a very intensive sampling of pregnancy outcomes in Amboseli baboons:
Lion predation on elephants
I'm reading a bit about risk in large animal hunting, and I ran across an article by Dereck Joubert on elephant hunting by lions in Botswana.
Drowning statistics
I got curious about drowning as a global cause of death tonight, so I did some research and found a paper by Etienne Krug et al. (2000).
Genetics and lifespan
The New York Times is carrying an article by Gina Kolata that discusses research on genetics and longevity. She has quotes from several big figures in the f...
How Hamilton mathed up senescence
This is one of the most beautiful openings to a paper, ever:
Drinking milk can give you twins?
Science Blog has a press release regarding the research of Gary Steinman on dietary influences on twinning. I'm going to cite a lenghty passage, because it'...
Longer life with younger mothers
This NIH study reported by E. J. Mundell is curious:
Is life history invariance an illusion or not?
I posted last year about a paper in Science by Sean Nee and colleagues, which showed that the idea of "life history invariants" was an illusion of flawed st...
Mandrill reproductive variance
Joanna Setchell and colleagues (2005) present observations on the sexual competition and reproductive success in mandrills. For a quick primer on mandrill s...
Get ready, we're getting older
The Scientist has a very nice article titled "The Longevity Dividend", about attempts to treat diseases of aging with preventative biotechnology. Some pe...
Gorillapause
I missed this story back in December about menopause in captive gorillas:
Cut early mortality; cut late mortality
A PNAS paper by Eileen Crimmins and Caleb Finch finds evidence that early infection, growth, and longevity are all linked:
Big brained bats
Yes, it's the expensive bat testicle hypothesis:
Paging Randy Newman…
If "short people got no reason to live", then why exactly do they live longer than tall people?
Life history invariants: broken beyond repair?
Here's a study that won't be reported in the science press, but is much more important to evolutionary theory than anything else I've read this month.
Bringing Kurzweil's dream to earth
I've seen a lot of attention to the new Ray Kurzweil book, Fanstastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, but only now have I seen a review by someone...
Genetics of the superfertile
Reuters reports on a research study by Dr. Neri Laufer (Hadassah University Hospital, Jerusalem) into the genetic variation underlying fertility in older wo...
Overweight is best?
The New York Times reports a new study in JAMA on the mortality risk associated with different BMI classes. The study found that obesity and underweight cla...
Caring for the edentulous
One of the features of the National Geographic (April 2005) article on Dmanisi is the discussion of the necessity of other people to aid and care for the ol...