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1 Sociality, Hierarchy, Health: Comparative Biodemography--Maxine Weinstein, Hillard Kaplan, and Meredith A. Lane
Pages 1-16

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From page 1...
... Initiatives as diverse as the Health and Retirement Study1 and its offshoots; Midlife in the United States;2 the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project;3 and the Taiwan biomarker study, Social Environment and Biomarkers of Aging Study4 have been providing social and demographic data that also incorporate a wide range of biomarkers. This line of research is explored in three National Research Council (NRC)
From page 2...
... This introduction does not pretend to be a comprehensive summary of the contents of this volume; rather, it is an admittedly idiosyncratic tour through some of the key areas of inquiry, important workshop discussions, and intellectual foci of the individual papers. The steering committee for the workshop that led to this volume was charged with commissioning papers that would examine cross-species comparisons of social environments with a focus on social behaviors along with social hierarchies and connections, to examine their effects on health, longevity, and life histories.
From page 3...
... Eisenberg, Anne Bronikowski and her colleagues, Steve Suomi, Michael Marmot and Robert Sapolsky, Paul Hooper and his colleagues, John Wingfield, Karen Ryan, Jenny Tung, Kenneth Weiss, ­ onathan J Stieglitz and his colleagues, Brian Johnson, Peter Ellison and Mary Ann Ottinger, Joan Silk, Susan Alberts and her colleagues, Janet Mann, John Haaga, David Miller, and Jeffrey Kahn. Papers from most of the presenters ­ at the workshop are included in this volume, and video-recordings of the workshop talks by those authors and discussants who have agreed are available at UCTV Seminars.6 LIFE HISTORIES AND INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSFERS Intergenerational transfers were a recurring theme in the presentations, papers, and discussions (see, for example, papers in this volume by Hooper, Gurven, and Kaplan, by Lee, by Stieglitz and co-authors, and by Wachter)
From page 4...
... Not all intergenerational transfers are downward, and as noted by Ellison and Ottinger, their proposed pathway allows for upward contributions from individuals who have not yet reached reproductive maturity, an opening for what they term "indirect reproductive effort." Such upward
From page 5...
... Even when net flows are downward across generations, day-to-day flows tend to go in both directions in small-scale human economies, revealing the importance of social integration to individual health and survival. The paper by Lee focuses on his work on the role of intergenerational transfers in life history theory.
From page 6...
... . who don't smoke, eat fast foods, or have differential access to health care depending on ability to pay," Marmot and Sapolsky speculate that low rank itself may not be the causal agent, rather, it may be that low rank is associated with lack of control over life circumstances, which in turn lead to stress and ultimately poor health.
From page 7...
... In contrast, among humans, social support and transfers of resources generate positive surpluses by buffering risk, providing help in times of illness, increasing resource production through cooperation, accruing gains from a division of labor by age and sex, and creating intergenerational assistance in human capital formation. Of course, competition and status striving is a feature of human social relationships that parallel those of baboons.
From page 8...
... Discussion and exchanges that followed Wachter's presentation point to the direction for the future. Wachter acknowledges that the genetic load explained by mutation accumulation theory is just a tiny part of the g ­ enome, and that optimizing selection on genes with pleiotropic effects is a major driver in genetic architecture.
From page 9...
... Kuzawa and Eisenberg provide additional examples of how context plays into inter­ generational transmission of environmental effects in their paper. Substantial notice has been given to the effects of early environmental experience on adult outcomes both in humans and nonhuman animals, but their paper and presentation highlight the pathways through which environmental effects can be transmitted to descendants: phenotype-to-phenotype transmission via placenta, breast milk, or parental behavior; direct germline epigenetic inheritance; and possibly, plasticity in telomere length as a potential transgenerational influence on lifespan.
From page 10...
... The core idea is that measures that get at variation in gene regulation, especially when viewed across the genome, can provide insight into how variation in environmental factors, including social experience, affect aging. Her paper lays out an ambitious agenda for integrating studies of population health and aging on the demographic side with, on the genetics side, functional genomic strategies for understanding the effects of the social environment.
From page 11...
... These competing goals are not new, but they have taken on new and increased urgency: The greater expense of s ­ tudies leads to greater pressures to make data publicly available, and the need for greater statistical power encourages pooling data across studies, while increasing internet access to data makes individual privacy and the confidentiality of data ever-receding targets. Conducting Biosocial Surveys (National Research Council, 2010)
From page 12...
... Among baboons, however, while females experience lower mortality, there is little evidence to suggest that females have worse health. They conclude that the delayed mortality advantage has a long evolutionary history, but the male health advantage does not.
From page 13...
... It is not known, for example, whether patterns of methylation during development and aging represent adaptive responses to phenotypic conditions. Still, in light of what appears to be a long evolutionary history of social interdependence in our species and in our ancestral primate line, it seems likely that natural selection has acted on how gene activity -- and cellular machinery more generally -- change in response to changes in social environments and phenotypic conditions.
From page 14...
... . Aging and fertility patterns in wild chimpanzees provide insights into the evolution of menopause.
From page 15...
... . Hierarchies of life histories and associated health risks.


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