Sociality, Hierarchy, Health Comparative Biodemography: A Collection of Papers (2014) / Chapter Skim
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7 Pathways of Survival and Social Structure During Human Transitions from the Darwinian World--Caleb Finch and Burton Singer
7 Pathways of Survival and Social Structure During Human Transitions from the Darwinian World--Caleb Finch and Burton Singer
Pages 145-168
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From page 145... ...
Social status and gender continued to be, as in centuries past (Benedictow, 2004) , major influences on morbidity and mortality that in the United States separate socioeconomic status (SES)
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The change from primarily infectious disease causes of death to noncommunicable chronic diseases in humans leads to different mechanisms associated with pathways to death and a major deviation from the Darwinian background where mortality from predation and infection was dominant. Extending the current focus in studies of LE from single hierarchies to the more nuanced consideration of multiple hierarchies and movement of individuals among them will require longitudinal data collection on human populations with this particular kind of emphasis.
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From page 147... ...
Lower down in the tree-like structure, there may be other unorderable groups that, as collectivities, dominate individuals or other unorderable groups lower down. The combination of individual vertices and subsets of unorderable individuals constitute a tree-like structure that is a cruder approximation of the idealized tree structure, the more subgroups there are containing unorderable individuals.
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indicate the shift from a Darwinian view of human lifespan to present and future complex settings where survival extends well beyond reproductive ages; and (4) specify a research agenda focused on a quantification of hierarchy involving multiple kinds of ties simultaneously.
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In the language of the morphospace, this meant that populations were tree-like, but that there were multiple tiers on the tree corresponding to essentially unorderable wealth groups, and with a strict hierarchy from one tier to the next moving down from the wealthiest to the poorest groups. The wealth groups reflected an ordering of persons by occupational skills with accompanying wage differentials in the occupational hierarchy.
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constructed coarse-grained economic status histories and personal relationship pathways and investigated their association with a biomarker risk index. The Economic Pathways are based on classification of individuals according to (1)
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. An individual was classified as having elevated morbidity risk for a given TABLE 7-2 Economic-Relationship Pathwaysa X Risk Index in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study A
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. For those on a negative relationship pathway, there is a basis for an ordering of economic pathways from persistently positive at the top to persistently negative at the bottom.
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. Social Hierarchy and Life Expectancy The Evolution of Lifespans In current evolutionary theory, the LE is an indirect outcome of natural selection to balance mortality against fecundity.
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Honey Bees. The honey bee (Apis mellifera) is an archetypal example of genomic programming for social classes with major differences of mortality and lifespan.
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However, this is decidedly not the case, as communication within and between castes, differing according to a particular task being executed, is a fundamental feature of honey bee and other social insect communities. To illustrate, imagine a network with five tasks (pollen dancing, pollen foraging, pollen storage, feeding p ollen, and brood care)
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Comparisons with human populations are not appropriate because field studies offer small samples and because field mortality rates are much above modern humans (Hill et al., 2001; Bronikowski et al., 2011)
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. Humans. Despite the huge advances in public health and social services, social status remains a strong influence on morbidity and mortality (Crimmins et al., 2009; Marmot and Sapolsky, this volume)
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Indeed, increased inflammation, dyslipidemia, atherosclerosis and thrombosis, and other organ damage, together with retarded growth and development, were a direct consequence of increased mono- and co-infection coupled to increasingly inadequate diets in lower SES. As a specific example, in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Eastern E urope from the 1500s into the early 20th century, infant and child mortality were very high in the lower tier of wealth, essentially due to infectious diseases and malnutrition (Weinryb, 1972)
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. We provisionally conclude that SES differences in LE were sporadic in the preindustrial world and did not appear to have stabilized across populations until the 20th century when infectious mortality was greatly reduced.
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A growing literature also documents relevant sex differences in animal models studied in vitro, for example, vasoresponses (Zhang et al., 2012) , and resistance of cardiomyocytes to hypoxia, which is greater in female-derived primary cultures (Ross and Howlett, 2012)
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. Canada is a leading counterexample, having introduced criteria for positive health and well-being two decades ago in national health statistics (Canadian Population Health Initiative, 2009)
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Humans are entering a post-Darwinian world with minimal natural selection for resistance to acute and chronic infections, and increasing concern about chronic noninfectious conditions. As the 21st century advances, most evidence points to further global reductions of chronic parasitic diseases and of childhood infections.
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Moreover, new Darwinian selection pressures from global environmental challenges may arise, with differential SES reproductive responses. The social network analysis sketched above can be further developed to track emergent trajectories of social support that we believe will remain a key to human health and well-being across the gradients of SES and LE.
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Science, 331, 1325-1328. Canadian Population Health Initiative.
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. Using retrospective health data from the Gombe chimpanzee study to inform future monitoring efforts.
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. Geographic distribution of dis ease mutations in the Ashkenazi Jewish population supports genetic drift over selection.
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American Journal of Human Biology, 22, 731-740. Wang, Y., and Beydoun, M.A.
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American Journal of Sociology, 81(4)
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