Michael Alvard

• Texas A&M University

Culturally inherited institutional norms structure much of human social life. Successfully replicating institutions train their current members to behave in the generally adaptive ways that served past members. Ancestor veneration is a well-known manifestation of this phenomenon whereby deference is conferred to prestigious past members who are use...

Human adaptation depends on the integration of slow life history, complex production skills, and extensive sociality. Refining and testing models of the evolution of human life history and cultural learning benefit from increasingly accurate measurement of knowledge, skills, and rates of production with age. We pursue this goal by inferring hunters...

Human adaptation depends upon the integration of slow life history, complex production skills, and extensive sociality. Refining and testing models of the evolution of human life history and cultural learning will benefit from increasingly accurate measurement of knowledge, skills, and rates of production with age. We pursue this goal by inferring...

Foragers must often travel from a central place to exploit aggregations of prey. These patches can be identified behaviorally when a forager shifts from travel to area restricted search, identified by a decrease in speed and an increase in sinuosity of movement. Faster, more directed movement is associated with travel. Differentiating foraging beha...

We used global positioning system (GPS) technology and tracking analysis to measure fishing effort by marine, small-scale, fish aggregating device (FAD) fishers of the Commonwealth of Dominica. FADs are human-made structures designed to float on the surface of the water and attract fish. They are also prone to common pool resource problems. To iden...

The process of partner selection reflects ethnographic realities where cooperative rewards obtain that would otherwise be lost to loners. Baumard et al. neglect frequency-dependent processes exemplified by games of coordination. Such games can produce multiple equilibria that may or may not include fair outcomes. Additional, group-selection process...

Taking evolutionary and interdisciplinary perspectives, this study views the reproductive result as an evolutionary outcome that may be affected by parental characteristics through cultural inheritance. We hypothesize that inheriting more cultural traits from parents leads to a greater resemblance between fertility outcomes of the offspring and the...

We agree with the comments by van Hoorn (1) on our critique (2): testing causal hypotheses about human behavior is a challenge (1, 3). Making progress requires specifying alternative hypotheses and then testing these hypotheses using diverse and converging lines of evidence. We have defended the hypothesis that social norms, which culturally coevol...

Lamba and Mace's critique (1) of our research (2–4) is based on incorrect claims about our experiments and several misunderstandings of the theory underpinning our efforts. Their findings are consistent with our previous work and lead to no unique conclusions. Lambda and Mace (1) incorrectly claimed that we “mostly” sampled from single communitie...

The human ability to form large, coordinated groups is among our most impressive social adaptations. Larger groups facilitate synergistic economies of scale for cooperative breeding, such economic tasks as group hunting, and success in conflict with other groups. In many organisms, genetic relationships provide the structure for sociality to evolve...

Chagnon’s analysis of a well-known axe fight in the Yanomamö village of Mishimishiböwei-teri (Chagnon and Bugos 1979) is among the earliest empirical tests of kin selection theory for explaining cooperation in humans. Kin selection theory describes how cooperation can be organized around genetic kinship and is a fundamental tool for understanding c...

A renewed interest in the hunting hypothesis has focused on the control and distribution of meat. A frequent observation among foragers is that large game prey resources are often widely distributed in a manner that suggests to some researchers that hunters do not own their prey and thus cannot direct meat distribution to their families. The 'show-...

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available...

We would like to thank the commentators for their generous comments, valuable insights and helpful suggestions. We begin this response by discussing the selfishness axiom and the importance of the preferences, beliefs, and constraints framework as a way of modeling some of the proximate influences on human behavior. Next, we broaden the discussion...

Data are presented on the benefits and costs that accrue to big game hunters living in the whaling community of Lamalera, Indonesia. Results indicate that big game hunting provides males a strong selective advantage. Harpooners, and to a lesser degree hunters in general, reap substantial fitness benefits from their activities. Hunters, especially h...

High producers are motivated to hunt in spite of high levels of sharing because the transfers come from absolutely larger amounts of resource. In the context of a generalized cooperative subsistence strategy, stinginess could provoke the withdrawal of cooperative partners and result in a loss of income. Good producers could have more to lose by not...

The Ultimatum Game was played with a group of traditional big game hunters: the Lamalera whalers of Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, whose community is described in the first section of the chapter. The methods used for the study are then outlined and the results presented and discussed. The results were consistent in some ways with those from trials in w...

Work was conducted among traditional, subsistence whale hunters in Lamalera, Indonesia, in order to test if strict biological kinship or lineage membership is more important for explaining the organization of cooperative hunting parties ranging in size from 8 to 14 men. Crew identifications were collected for all 853 hunts that occurred between May...

Some have argued that the major contribution of anthropology to science is the concept of culture. Until very recently, however, evolutionary anthropologists have largely ignored culture as a topic of study. This is perhaps because of the strange bedfellows they would have to maintain. Historically, anthropologists who claimed the focus of cultural...

Rejecting evolutionary principles is a mistake, because evolutionary processes produced the irrational human minds for which Colman argues. An evolved cultural ability to acquire information socially and infer other's mental states (mind-reading) evokes Stackelberg reasoning. Much of game theory, however, assumes away information transfer and exclu...

In spite of its common use as a tool for examining cooperation, the prisoner's dilemma game does not conform to the reality of many socio-ecological contexts. Situations in which people engage in joint activities and maintain agreement in their preferences for outcomes are called "coordination games" by game theorists and "mutualism" by biologists....

Work was conducted among traditional, subsistence whale hunters in Lamalera, Indonesia in order to test if kinship or lineage membership is more important for explaining the organization of cooperative hunting parties ranging in size from 8-14 men. Crew identifications were collected for all 853 hunts that occurred between May 3 and August 5, 1999....

A renewed interest in the hunting hypothesis has focused on the control and distribution of meat. A frequent observation among foragers is that large game prey resources are often widely distributed in a manner that suggests to some researchers that hunters do not own their prey and thus cannot direct meat distribution to their families. The `show-...

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Experimental behavioral scientists have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in over a hundred experiments from around the world. Prior research cannot determine whether this uniformity results from universal patterns of behavior, or from the limited cultural variation among the university student...

We define animal husbandry as prey conservation. Conservation is rare among extant hunters and only likely to occur when prey are highly valued, private goods. The long-term discounted deferred returns from husbandry must also be greater than the short-term returns from hunting. We compare the returns from hunting and husbanding strategies as a fun...

Conflicts arise between subsistence hunters and those who wish to conserve the animals they hunt. Solutions require measures of sustainability. Data are presented on the sustainability for the Wana hunters living in the highlands of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Pigs (Sus celebensis) and dwarf buffalo (Bubalus spp.) account for 58 percent and 40 per...

The cooperative acquisition, defense and distribution of meat are common problems that must be solved by social hunters. These were also problems faced by any of our hominid ancestors that may have hunted large game in our evolutionary past. Much of the last 40 years of research in evolutionary ecology has tried to understand such cooperative behav...

Guided by life-history theory, we examine the contexts in which reproductive interests (e.g., attracting and keeping a spouse) shape forager mobility. Using quantitative intercultural and intracultural mating distance data, we report significant correlations between mating distance and population density not only among foragers but also among farme...

Recent field work has shown that, contrary to commonly held beliefs, subsistence hunters do not conserve prey resources. Evolutionary ecologists have approached this problem by using foraging theory to show that subsistence hunters prefer short-term returns over the potential long-term returns generated by resource conservation. An important reason...

Hunting is an important component of native subsistence strategies in Amazonia. It is also a serious threat to biodiversity in some areas. We present data on the faunal harvests of two native Neotropical subsistence hunting peoples, Machiguenga bow-hunters and Piro shotgun hunters of Peru. The rate of annual harvest per square kilometer of catchmen...

This paper tests the idea that subsistence hunters use selective intraspecific prey choice to increase the sustainability of their long-term harvest-in other words, to conserve. It is suggested that much of what has been considered conservation by native peoples is probably epiphenomenal. The misidentification of apparent conservation as genuine is...

The shift to the use of shotguns from traditional hunting weapons has often been mentioned as one of the factors contributing to over-hunting in the tropics. It has also been argued that indigenous people using traditional hunting methods are conservationists because they do not over-exploit natural resources. A study of two Indian communities in s...

Native peoples have often been portrayed as natural conservationists, living a "balanced" existence with nature. It is argued that this perspective is a result of an imprecise operational definition of conservation. Conservation is defined here in contrast to the predictions of foraging theory, which assumes that foragers will behave to maximize th...

Native peoples have often been portrayed as natural conservationists, living in harmony with their environment. It is argued that this perspective is a result of an imprecise definition of conservation that emphasizes effects rather than actual behavior. Using foraging theory as a contrast, an operational definition of conservation is offered. Fora...