Foraging humans, mammals and birds who live in the same place behave similarly (opens in new tab)

> Human Behavioral Ecology

I would say we are increasingly in a society were popular sentiment is hostile to this category of explanation.

It doens't hurt to popularize it.

> It's always interesting to see how the press office paints these things as historic eureka moments. These results, while fascinating, are basically in line with what we call Behavioral Ecology and more specifically, Human Behavioral Ecology. The latter has emerged as a pretty strong framework in the past few years. This sort of support is nice to see (and there's been a decent bit of buzz about this particular paper!), but it's evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

It's almost like Man finally accepted that it is part of Nature, isn't?

It's sad, as Biologists we wasted so much time memorizing archaic data, experimental designs, mechanisms often based on the observations (Evolution and inheritance via genetics) of aristocrats who dropped out of Society (Darwin) or Monks (Mendel) with no real formal 'scientific education' instead of going out and falling in love with Nature and trying to utilize it's methods into our 21st calamity and increase it's use cases.

Irony and reminder of Man's infinite folly when it comes to Nature: Father of modern theory of Evolution (Charles Darwin) also practiced incest.

Table derived from Fig 2. in the paper:

  1. Foraging Behavior
  ====================
     1.1    Meat diet
     1.2    Fish diet
     1.3    Food storage
     1.4    Day range
     1.5    Migratory distance

  2. Reproductive Behavior
  ========================
     2.1    Age at first reproduction
     2.2    Polygyny
     2.3    Patrilocality
     2.4    Exogamy
     2.5    Divorce

  3. Social Behavior
  ==================
    3.1    Paternal care
    3.2    Population density
    3.3    Group size
    3.4    Distribution range
    3.5    Social classes

Short answer: No. You should always be wary of trying to apply evolutionary models to achieve specific real-world goals. Given the past history here, I'll go out on a limb and say that it's always a mistake.

Even if it was the right choice, these sorts of things have a dizzying array of unintuitive results and even the academics involved are still working out a lot of the implications. In particular, we don't have a good understanding of how applicable these results (and the wider predictions of HBE) are to non-foraging human societies.

It seems to me that changing the environment to manipulate human behaviour ultimately creates stress (in a very literal sense), which is likely to undermine the goal.

I came away with a different take away.

Perhaps a sustainable ecosystem is more likely to thrive if those at the top follow the same model patterns of interaction.

.. and perhaps, the fact that there's an evolutionary biological precident suggests that we were in step with a sustainable model for longer than we've been out of step.

It's an analysis of observational data. It doesn't have to be surprising. Anyway it's nice to get a confirmation of something we might have only suspected before.