Category Archives: Human Ecology

Anthropology, Evolution, Human Ecology

Ecology, Evolution, and Human Health

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Yesterday, I spent most of the day collecting content for my upcoming classes this spring and getting the course web sites together.  For the first time in a while, I will (officially) be teaching two classes in one quarter (which effectively means teaching three or four when I add the other things like lab meetings in).  The first is our graduate class on statistics in the anthropological sciences.  I taught something like this back in the old department (i.e., Anthropological Sciences) but haven't taught it in years (though a Google search for "department of anthropological sciences stanford" turns up the syllabus for this class).  It is technically a requirement for Ph.D. students in the Ecology and Environment focus within Anthropology, so it's about time.  It will be fun to teach again and we're looking to use the class as a platform to develop resources for anthropologists doing statistical work (more later).

The other class that I will be teaching starting next week is Ecology, Evolution, and Human Health, a class I first taught last year. This class is meant to be an introduction to the Ecology and Environment undergraduate focus in Anthropology.  I'm actually really looking forward to teaching it again.  The course material forms the core of a book I am writing on human population biology and my attempts at improving the lectures has done wonders for my writing output of late.  We'll see what happens when the quarter actually starts. Hopefully, between trips to Rwanda and Tanzania and moving into Arroyo House this summer, I will find time to finish it!

Back in December, when the is-anthropology-science kerfuffle was going strong, I wrote a blog post in which I suggested that if you want to feel good about the future of scientific anthropology (which, I admit, can sometimes be difficult, even for an obstinate optimist), all you need to do is look at the great work coming from the new generation of trans-disciplinary anthropologists (and other biosocial scientists).  At the time, I put together a short list of people whose work I greatly admire.  These included:

  • Craig Hadley at Emory on food security and psychological well-being
  • Amber Wutich at ASU on vulnerability, water security, and common-pool resources
  • Lance Gravlee at UF on the embodiment of racial discrimination and its manifestations in health
  • Brooke Scelza at UCLA on parental investment and childhood outcomes
  • Dan Hrushka at ASU on how cultural beliefs, norms and values interact with economic constraints to produce health outcomes
  • Crickette Sanz at Washington University on multi-ape ecology of the Goualougo Triangle, Republic of Congo
  • Herman Pontzer at CUNY on measuring daily energy expenditures in hunter-gatherers
  • Rebecca and Douglas Bird on subsistence and signaling among Martu foragers

In preparing for Anthro 31, I started to put together a list of links to people doing the kind of work we will discuss.  In a pique of obsessiveness yesterday, I greatly expanded that list.  It occurred to me that this list is somewhat orphaned in an obscure directory for a particular class I occasionally teach and that it would make sense to share it more generally.  So, here we go, copied wholesale from my class links page (though that page still contains links to books, professional societies, and other resources for students interested in human ecology, demography, health, etc.):

There are a number of excellent practicing anthropologists who maintain science blogs. Among these are Kate Clancy's (UIUC) Context and Variation, Daniel Lende and Greg Downey's Neuroanthropology, Julienne Rutherford's AAPA BANDIT, and Patrick Clarkin's blog dedicated to biological anthropology, war and health, growth nutrition. Along with Rebecca Stumpf, Kate Clancy is also the director of the Laboratory for Evolutionary Endocrinology (which has its own blog) at the University of Illinois.

Upon further reflection, I think that the University of Illinois has to be a major contender for best place to study biological anthropology. Wow, they've got an amazing group of biological anthropologists there. Stanley Ambrose, Kate Clancy, Paul Garber, Lyle Konigsberg, Steve Leigh, Ripan Malhi, John Polk, Charles Roseman, Laura Shackelford, Rebecca Stumpf. Too many to link to directly. I don't know all of them, but the ones I know are outstanding. Yipes! I think they may be plotting to take over the field.

Back to the blog front, you can always count on gems of anthropological, evolutionary, and political wisdom from Greg Laden as well.

Susan C. Antón (NYU) and Josh Snodgrass (Oregon) organize the Bones and Behavior Working Group, the goal of which is to foster greater synthesis across the different sub-areas of biological anthropology. Of particular interest are their standardized protocols for anthropometry.

Mario Luis Small, at the University of Chicago, has done some really outstanding work measuring how social institutions affect social capital and the impact such differences in social capital actually have for people's well-being.

Richard Bribiescas is the author of Men: Evolutionary and Life History and is director of the Reproductive Ecology Laboratory at Yale. Yale is also now the home to Catherine Panter-Brick who also happens to be the senior editor for medical anthropology at Social Science and Medicine.

A number of excellent human biologists find their home in the Laboratory for Human Biology Research at Northwestern. This includes Bill Leonard, Thom McDade, and Chris Kuzawa. Rumor has it that alumna Elizabeth Sweet is moving back to Northwestern as well. She is doing truly innovative work integrating the rigorous analysis of biomarkers of health (and a bicultural perspective favored by the Northwestern group) and the political economy of economic and social disparities -- really getting at how inequality 'gets under the skin.'  I really look forward to seeing what comes from her future research.

Karen Kramer, in the department formerly known as (Biological) Anthropology at Harvard, is a real leader in integrating evolutionary, demographic, and economic perspectives on human reproduction and the life histories.

Patrick Clarkin at UMass, Boston has a very interesting research program employing biocultural and evolutionary models to understand the effects of war on nutrition and growth among SE Asian diaspora. UMass, Boston is also home to Colleen Nyberg who does great work on acculturation and health, the psychobiology of stress and HPA function, and growth and development.

Julienne Rutherford at the University of Illinois, Chicago School of Dentistry works on the role of the intrauterine environment on health. Of particular interest for this class is her collaborative work on understanding the epigenetic regulation of placental systems of amino acid transport as part of the Cebu Longitudinal Study in the Philippines. UIC also has a number of excellent human biologists scattered about in anthropology, including Betsy Abrams and Crystal Patil, Epidemiology (Bob Bailey) and Community Health Sciences (Nadine Peacock).

Let's not forget our friends across The Pond. Durham may have lost Catherine Panter-Brick to Yale, but they got a number of new folks who, when combined with the veterans, make it a very appealing place to study ecological/evolutionary anthropology. Among the faculty there are my colleagues Gillian Bentley, Rebecca Sear, and Frank Marlowe, and numerous others. Rebecca does very sophisticated work in anthropological demography, while Frank is one of the leading ethnographers of contemporary hunter-gatherers (and my collaborator on our Hadza demography project).

Ruth Mace, in my opinion, does some of the best work in human behavioral ecology right now and she keeps churning out top students at UCL.

I'm looking forward to working with Mhairi Gibson at Bristol on our new project on the transmission dynamics of primate retroviruses and human-wildlife contact in Uganda. She has done excellent work on the behavioral ecology of reproduction and parental investment in Ethiopia.

I will also mention a number of excellent researchers who teach classes that are relevant to Ecology, Evolution, and Human Health:

Mark Moritz at Ohio State University has established a Hunter-Gatherer Wiki is conjunction with his course on Hunter-Gatherers. Mark came and gave a terrific talk on livestock exchanges among FulBe pastoralists at the MAPSS colloquium this year.

Mike Gurven at UCSB teaches a course on the behavioral ecology of hunter-gatherers. Mike does some of the most interesting biodemographic work out there these days.

Bruce Winterhalder at UC Davis, a founding father of human behavioral ecology, has a very interesting course on classics in cultural ecology.

Claudia Valeggia, at Penn, does great work among the Toba people of Argentina teaches a class on reproductive ecology.

Lots of good people. Lots of good work.  Surely, there is reason for optimism...

Biofuels, Diet & Nutrition, Human Ecology

Jennifer Burney Lecture

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I've spent the better part of the day editing web pages as I prepare to teach two courses this spring. Given that I've more-or-less wasted the day with necessary but not especially intellectually rewarding tasks, I thought that I would take a moment to post something really important and scientifically interesting. Jennifer Burney, of Stanford's Program in Food Security and the Environment, gave a talk entitled "Food's Footprint: Agriculture and Climate Change" at Oregon State's Food for Thought Series. We've known Jen for a long time now.  If memory serves me correctly, she was in my wife Libra's section of the American Civil War at Harvard in Fall of 1995. Later she was a student in Mather House, where we were resident tutors from 1997-2001. She went on to do a Ph.D. in physics at Stanford and then moved into a post-doctoral fellowship at FSE.

Jen and all the folks at FSE are doing great and fundamental work.  In this talk, she presents results that may seem somewhat counter-intuitive. Namely, she shows that the agricultural intensification attendant to the Green Revolution has been good for global carbon budgets -- and feeding hungry people.  It's all about counterfactuals. I am looking forward to reading this work since some of these counterfactuals depend critically on demographic assumptions.

As she says in the talk, just because the results suggest that intensive agriculture is good from a global warming perspective, doesn't take Big Agriculture off the hook. There are items that their models don't incorporate (but could in principle) and they don't consider anything other than carbon budgets.  It would be nice to think of a way of uniting all the costs and benefits of intensification in a single framework.

This is very important stuff and the work highlights the complexities of population, environment, and food production. I look forward to seeing more work from Jen and her collaborators at FSE.

Demography, Human Ecology

Update on Stanford Workshop on Migration and Adaptation

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Since my last update, we have added another faculty member to the workshop on Migration and Adaptation. Loren Landau, the Director of the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) (formerly Forced Migration Studies Programme, FMSP) at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa will be joining us to discuss conceptual issues in understanding African migration as well as research opportunities through ACMS. This means that we have the following confirmed speakers:

  • James Holland Jones, Department of Anthropology and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University (organizer): Formal Models of Migration; Population Projection
  • Shripad Tuljapurkar, Department of Biology, Stanford University (organizer): Stochastic Forecasting
  • Eric Lambin, Environmental and Earth Systems Science and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Pixels to People Approaches to Studying Migration
  • David Lobell, Environmental and Earth Systems Science and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Global Climate Change and Food Insecurity
  • William H. Durham, Department of Anthropology and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Smallholder Responses to Risk and Uncertainty
  • Ronald Rindfuss, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina and The East-West Center: Population and Environment; Microsimulation
  • Amber Wutich, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Water Insecurity
  • Lori Hunter, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado: Migration and Health
  • David Lopez-Carr, Department of Geography, University of California Santa Barbara: Migration and Fertility on the Forest Frontier
  • Loren Landau, African Centre for Migration Studies, Witwatersrand, Conceptual and Empirical Issues in African Migration

This is a great line-up and I'm very excited about this (and there are still a couple invitations pending based on complicated field schedules). We will hold the workshop at the IRiSS facility at 30 Alta Rd., bordering the main campus. This is a lovely spot for a workshop.

Details on applying for the workshop are contained here. We will pay for approved travel expenses of accepted students, post-docs, and junior faculty associated with NICHD-funded population centers.

Human Ecology

Gojira and Japan's Nuclear Anxieties

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The tragic events that have transpired in Japan following the March 11 magnitude 9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami are almost too horrible to fathom at this moment.  One very small pleasure I have gotten out of this is seeing the very interesting piece in the New York Times on what the Godzilla movies reveal about Japanese anxieties over nuclear energy written by my good friend, Pete Kirby, an anthropologist who studies the environment and the place of nuclear energy in Japanese culture. Pete tells the back-story that motivates the original (1954) movie, 'Gojira.'  It's probably not what you think. This surprise is echoed by Andrew O'Hehir his article on the Japanese taste for apocalyptic cinema in Slate.

The key issue that the Godzilla movies reveal about Japan is its vulnerability.  Pete writes:

If there is any thread running through this sprawling bestiary of monster films, it is “the profound vulnerability of Japan,” as William Tsutsui writes in his acclaimed book “Godzilla on My Mind.” Japan, relatively powerless in the cold war arena in reality, is able in a fictional world to muster its heavily armed and impressively disciplined Self-Defense Forces to fight against, or occasionally delay or redirect, the colossal rampaging of outlandish threats.
But the films also clearly depict a human population that is, again and again, boxing above its weight class.

If there is any thread running through this sprawling bestiary of monster films, it is “the profound vulnerability of Japan,” as William Tsutsui writes in his acclaimed book “Godzilla on My Mind.” Japan, relatively powerless in the cold war arena in reality, is able in a fictional world to muster its heavily armed and impressively disciplined Self-Defense Forces to fight against, or occasionally delay or redirect, the colossal rampaging of outlandish threats... But the films also clearly depict a human population that is, again and again, boxing above its weight class.

And he reminds us that these cheesy monster movies end up being more prescient than we'd like to think:

If the monster-film genre is less ubiquitous than it once was, the themes it reflected are no less present today, particularly in the 24-hour blanket coverage of last week’s earthquakes and tsunami. It shows a Japan that remains visibly beset by large-scale threats that strike without warning. Japan’s emergency response teams rescue citizens stranded amid once-thriving cities I have visited in years past that are now little more than sludge and debris. Cars, trucks, trains and large ships lie swept into piles ashore or float in murky water like misshapen bath toys. Buildings implode and fires rage as if ignited by a burst of radioactive breath or a flick of a great creature’s tail.

As I try to find some down-time in the frantic run-up to teaching two very intense courses next quarter (which starts in just over a week!), I will try to catch up on my Godzilla movies, probably late at night a bleary-eyed and stiff-fingered from a day hacking at my computer.  I certainly expect to see them in a new light.

Anthropology, Demography, Human Ecology, Teaching

New Formal Demography Workshop: Migration and Adaptation

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We will be having another of our occasional Stanford Workshops in Formal Demography this April 28th-30th. The theme this time will be "Migration and Adaptation," and we have a terrific lineup of speakers coming. As in the past, the workshop is funded by NICHD and receives substantial suport from the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS). What is somewhat different this time is that we actually have our own center now, The Stanford Center for Population Research (SCPR). Here's the basic idea for the workshop:

Mobility is a common form of human adaptation to social or environmental risks.  Forms of human mobility vary with regard to permanency and spatial scale.  For example, foragers or pastoralists may move seasonally in response to resource scarcity and opportunity throughout a more or less stable greater home range. Smallholders and agrarian peasants might be displaced on a more permanent basis as a result of conflict or extreme resource scarcity, migrating internally to cities or other relatively nearby localities perceived to be less risky.  International economic migrants may travel long distances on a more or less permanent basis in search of economic opportunity abroad.

Global climate change is predicted to increase migration rates substantially by the middle of the 21st century.  This increase in migration is likely to result from multiple, interacting causal mechanisms including an increase in adverse weather events (e.g., droughts, floods), an increase in resource-related conflicts, or declining viability of local environments arising from various forms of land-use/land-cover change.  These increases will add to the already substantial movement of human population from rural to urban areas, in response to internal social displacement, and from other economic migration.

Understanding human migration requires the input from scientists from a wide range of disciplines. We are particularly interested in approaches that combine the formalism of demography, on-the-ground social research, and remotely-sensed information of the biophysical environment, the so-called "pixels to people" approach.

In this workshop, we will bring together demographers, anthropologists, economists, and geographers to develop a methodological toolkit for understanding migration as an adaptation to risk.  The specific aim of the workshop is to promote knowledge of methods and perspectives from different disciplines, disseminate information about the growing wealth of demographic data on the biophysical environment and human migration, and to foster collaborative and interdisciplinary work. The format will consist of lectures by invited researchers to an audience of other researchers, selected graduate students, and junior faculty. The three-day workshop will have approximately ten faculty and 20 students, whose travel, lodging, and meals will be covered.  The format provides substantial time for discussion. The workshop will be held at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), Stanford 28-30 April 2011.

Confirmed speakers include:

  • James Holland Jones, Department of Anthropology and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University (organizer): Formal Models;
    Population Projection
  • Shripad Tuljapurkar, Department of Biology, Stanford University (organizer): Stochastic Forecasting
  • Eric Lambin, Environmental and Earth Systems Science and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Pixels to People
  • David Lobell, Environmental and Earth Systems Science and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Global Climate Change and Food Insecurity
  • William H. Durham, Department of Anthropology and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Smallholder Responses to Risk and Uncertainty
  • Ronald Rindfuss, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina and The East-West Center: Population and Environment; Microsimulation
  • Amber Wutich, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Water Insecurity
  • Lori Hunter, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado: Migration and Health
  • David Lopez-Carr, Department of Geography, University of California Santa Barbara: Migration and Fertility on the Forest Frontier

A (rather large) printable flier for the workshop can be found here.  It includes information on how to apply.  Hopefully, we will soon have an all official-like webpage through IRiSS as well, which I will point to when it goes live.

Diet & Nutrition, Human Ecology

Food Prices Continue to Rise

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Newly released data by FAO show that food prices continued to rise, up 3.4% from the last month of 2010. This is yet another record high. Here is a plot based on the FAO data (click to enlarge):

fpi-ts-1990-2011

An article in today's New York Times attributes much of the rise in price to uncertainty over coming harvests. It also notes the four main factors that contribute to increased price: weather, higher demand (from larger population size and greater demand for meat and dairy), smaller yields, and the diversion of food crops to biofuels.

Human Ecology

Winter Weirding

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As I listen to the deluge of reports of horrible winter weather from friends back on the east coast, I came across this video by Peter Sinclair from his YouTube series, "Climate Denial Crock of the Week." The part I find most compelling is the animation toward the end of this short video showing what looks an awful lot like the displacement of cold Arctic air down into North America and Eurasia by much warmer (as high as 20 degrees F) in the Arctic.

Diet & Nutrition, Human Ecology

Worrying Trends

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The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization's food price index is at an all-time high, meaning that the food security of millions of people is in jeopardy. In the plot below (click to enlarge), we can see that the FPI currently just exceeds its previous high in June of 2008, when riots over food shortages were widespread. This is something to keep an eye on for the new year.

fpi-ts-1990-2010

Anthropology, Human Ecology, Infectious Disease

Measuring Epidemiological Contacts in Schools

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I am happy to report that our paper describing the measurement of casual contacts within an American high school is finally out in the early edition of PNAS. Stanford's great social science reporter, Adam Gorlick, has written a very nice overview of our paper for the Stanford Report (also here in the LA Times and here on Medical News Today). The lead author, and general force of nature behind this paper, is Marcel Salathé, who until recently was a post-doc here at Stanford in Marc Feldman's lab.  This summer, Marcel moved to the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State, a truly remarkable place and now all the better for having Marcel.  From the Penn State end, there is a nice video describing our results as well as well as a brief note on Marcel's blog.  This paper has not been picked up quite like our paper on plague dynamics this summer, probably because measuring casual contacts in an American high school generally does not involve carnivorous mice.

With generous NSF funding, we were able to buy a lot of wireless sensor motes -- enough to outfit every student, teacher, and staff member at a largish American high school so that we could record all of their close contacts in a single, typical day. By "close contact," we mean any more-or-less face-to-face interaction within a radius of three meters.  As Marcel was putting together this project, we were (once again) exceptionally lucky to find ourselves at Stanford along with one of the world authorities on wireless sensor technology, Phil Levis, of Stanford's Computer Science department.  Phil and his students, Maria and Jung Woo Lee, made this work come together in ways that I can't even begin to fathom.  This actually leads me to a brief diversion to reflect on the nature of collaboration.  As with our plague paper or SIV mortality paper, this paper is one where collaboration between very different types of researchers (viz., Biologists, Computer Scientists, Anthropologists) is absolutely fundamental to the success of the work.  In coming up for tenure -- and generally living in an anthropology department -- the question of what I might call the partible paternity of papers (PPP) comes up fairly regularly. "I see you have a paper with five co-authors; I guess that means you contributed 17% to this paper, no?"  Well, no, actually.  I call this the "additive fallacy of collaboration." When a paper is truly collaborative, then the contributions of the paper are not mutually exclusive from each other and so do not simply sum.  To use a familiar phrase, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  Our current paper is an example of such a truly collaborative project.  Without the contributions of all the collaborators, it's not that the paper would be 17% less complete; it probably wouldn't exist. I can't speak particularly fluently to what Phil, Maria, and Jung Woo did other than by saying, "wow" (thus our collaboration), but I can say that we couldn't have done it without them.

I'll talk more about our actual results later.  For now, you'll either have to read the paper (which is open access), watch the video, or read the overview in the Stanford Report.

Anthropology, Human Ecology, Teaching

Nicholas Wade on Science and Anthropology

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Nicholas Wade, who normally writes really terrific stuff on science in the New York Times, has a brief piece on our Anthropology fracas du jour. It's good to see an expression of concern for the place of science in anthropology in such a prominent place and by such an important science writer.  I just wish he had gotten a few more things right.  While the Darkness in El Dorado fiasco was not a high point for the AAA, I suspect that this had not one iota to do with the re-wording of AAA's long-range planning document. Secondly, I was pretty horrified to learn that science can't be used as a framework for studying gender, ethnicity, and race, nor, apparently, can scientists advocate for indigenous people's or human rights:

The decision [to remove the word 'science' from the long-range planning document] has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.

I think that this will come as quite an unpleasant surprise to many fine scientific anthropologists who are apparently fooling themselves by attempting to understand race or gender or working to improve the lives of the people with whom they work.

So, I'm left with mixed feelings about this turn of events.  On the one hand, the prominence of a Science Times piece by Nicholas Wade means that debate is likely to continue for a while to come. It would be particularly helpful if this work helped engage what I suspect is a quiet majority of anthropologists who are (1) sympathetic to science maintaining a prominent place in anthropology, and (2) too busy with their work to worry about yet another shrill controversy in the professional society they may or may not belong to (having given up membership because they already felt it didn't represent their interests). On the other hand, I think we're going to need to stop being inflammatory and falling back on facile received categories (e.g., "postmodernists," "sociobiologists," etc.) at every opportunity if we are going to make this debate productive and fashion a society that is friendly to rigorous scholarship in whatever form it may take. For my part, I am sticking with my view that the best way to promote science in anthropology is to do it, do it well, and communicate with a broad scientific readership.

Back to grading my final exams...