Life History Strategies

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-126
Author(s):  
Marco Del Giudice
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Life History Strategy ◽  
Current Theory ◽  
Life History Strategies ◽  
Extended Model ◽  
Life History Variation ◽  
Basic Model

The chapter introduces the basics of life history theory, the concept of life history strategy, and the fast–slow continuum of variation. After reviewing applications to animal behavior and physiology, the chapter reviews current theory and evidence on individual differences in humans as manifestations of alternative life history strategies. The chapter first presents a “basic model” of human life history–related traits, then advances an “extended model” that identifies multiple cognitive-behavioral profiles within fast and slow strategies. Specifically, it is proposed that slow strategies comprise prosocial/caregiving and skilled/provisioning profiles, whereas fast strategies comprise antisocial/exploitative and seductive/creative profiles. The chapter also reviews potential neurobiological markers of life history variation and considers key methodological issues in this area.

scholarly journals Perceptions of procedural justice and police legitimacy: A life history perspective

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jody Dorgan
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Procedural Justice ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Population Sample ◽  
Life History Strategy ◽  
Demographic Factors ◽  
Police Legitimacy ◽  
Prior Arrest

<p>Prior research on attitudes towards the police has largely focused on the relationship between demographic factors and perceptions of the police. These studies have produced inconclusive results, and there is no general consensus why and how demographic factors account for individual differences in attitudes towards the police. Life history theory, a “middle-level” evolutionary theory, is one that has largely been neglected in mainstream criminology, but has been used in the current research to explain individual differences in attitudes towards the police. Two studies, both using an online survey, were conducted to explore the extent to which life history strategy explained individual attitudes towards procedural justice, police legitimacy and police socialization after controlling for demographic factors, previous police interaction and prior arrest. Study one, a university sample of 305 participants and study two, a general population sample of 75 Wellington residents both found support for the application of life history theory being used to explain individual differences in attitudes towards the police. Overall, the current research showed that those with a slower life history strategy were more likely hold more positive perceptions of police legitimacy, procedural justice and police socialization regardless of demographic factors, previous police interaction, and prior arrest.</p>

scholarly journals Cyclical environments drive variation in life history strategies: a general theory of cyclical phenology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Park
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Natural Populations ◽  
Life History Evolution ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Life History Strategies ◽  
Life History Variation ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Overwhelming Evidence ◽  
Phenological Shifts

ABSTRACTCycles, such as seasons or tides, characterize many systems in nature. Overwhelming evidence shows that climate change-driven alterations to environmental cycles—such as longer seasons— are associated with phenological shifts around the world, suggesting a deep link between environmental cycles and life cycles. However, general mechanisms of life history evolution in cyclical environments are still not well understood. Here I build a demographic framework and ask how life history strategies optimize fitness when the environment perturbs a structured population cyclically, and how strategies should change as cyclicality changes. I show that cycle periodicity alters optimality predictions of classic life history theory because repeated cycles have rippling selective consequences over time and generations. Notably, fitness landscapes that relate environmental cyclicality and life history optimality vary dramatically depending on which trade-offs govern a given species. The model tuned with known life history trade-offs in a marine intertidal copepod T. californicus successfully predicted the shape of life history variation across natural populations spanning a gradient of tidal periodicities. This framework shows how environmental cycles can drive life history variation—without complex assumptions of individual responses to cues such as temperature—thus expanding the range of life history diversity explained by theory and providing a basis for adaptive phenology.

scholarly journals Life history strategies explain bacterial activity in the soil carbon cycle

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel E. Barnett ◽  
Nicholas D. Youngblut ◽  
Chantal N. Koechli ◽  
Daniel H. Buckley
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Life History Strategy ◽  
Community Response ◽  
Stable Isotope Probing ◽  
Bacterial Activity ◽  
Life History Strategies ◽  
Soil System ◽  
C Cycle ◽  
C Assimilation

AbstractSoil microorganisms determine the fate of soil organic matter (SOM), and their activities comprise a major component of the global carbon (C) cycle. We sought to comprehend the physiological and ecological mechanisms underpinning microbial contributions to SOM dynamics by examining the activities of individual microorganisms within a complex soil system. We determined bacterial activity by using a multi-substrate DNA-stable isotope probing experiment to track C assimilation dynamics across thousands of bacteria within an agricultural soil. In this way, we identified 1,286 bacterial taxa assimilating C from SOM. Substrate bioavailability explained significant variation in mineralization rates and microbial assimilation dynamics. We show that, while patterns of C assimilation exhibited little phylogenetic conservation above the species level, these patterns defined functional clusters whose properties exemplified broad differences in life history strategy, particularly along the copiotroph-oligotroph continuum. We also show that these functional clusters explain soil community response to fresh litter, and patterns of microbial biogeography at continental and global scales. Our results add to the growing body of knowledge indicating that life history theory provides a useful framework for understanding microbial contributions to terrestrial C-cycling.

scholarly journals Do human ‘life history strategies’ exist?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Sear
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Life History ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Life History Traits ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Environmental Influences ◽  
Life History Strategy ◽  
Life History Strategies ◽  
Human Sciences

Interest in incorporating life history research from evolutionary biology into the human sciences has grown rapidly in recent years. Two core features of this research have the potential to prove valuable in strengthening theoretical frameworks in the health and social sciences: the idea that these is a fundamental trade-off between reproduction and health; and that environmental influences are important in determining individual life histories. For example, the idea that mortality risk in the environment shifts individuals along a ‘fast-slow continuum’ of ‘life history strategy’ is now popular in the evolutionary human sciences. In biology, ‘fast’ life history strategists prioritise reproduction over health so that individuals grow quickly, reproduce early and often, and suffer a rapid deterioration in health and relatively early death; ‘slow’ strategists start reproducing later, have fewer offspring, and die at an older age. Evolutionary human scientists tend to assume that, along with these life history outcomes, several behavioural traits, such as parenting, mating and risk-taking behaviour and, in the most expansive version, a whole suite of psychological and personality traits also cluster together into ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ life histories. Here, I review the different approaches to life history strategies from evolutionary anthropologists, developmental psychologists and evolutionary psychologists, in order to assess the theoretical and empirical evidence for human ‘life history strategies’. While there is precedent in biology for the argument that some behavioural traits, notably risk-taking behaviour, may be linked in predictable ways with life history outcomes, there is relatively little theoretical or empirical justification for including a very wide range of behavioural traits in a ‘life history strategy’. Given the diversity and lack of consistency in this human life history literature, I then make recommendations for improving its usefulness: 1) greater clarity over terminology, so that a distinction is made between life history outcomes such as age at maturity, first birth and death, and behavioural traits which may be associated with life history outcomes but are not life history traits themselves; 2) more empirical data on linkages between life history traits, behavioural traits and the environment, including the underlying mechanisms which generate these linkages; 3) more empirical work on life history strategies in a much broader range of populations than has so far been studied. Such a research programme on human life history has the potential to produce valuable insights for the health and social sciences, not least because of its interest in environmental influences on health, reproduction and behaviour.

scholarly journals Drought frequency predicts life history strategies in Heliophila

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Grey Monroe ◽  
Brian Gill ◽  
Kathryn Turner ◽  
John K McKay
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Life History Strategy ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Life History Strategies ◽  
Perennial Species ◽  
Drought Frequency ◽  
Occurrence Records

Explaining variation in life history strategies is a long-standing goal of evolutionary biology. For plants, annual and perennial life histories are thought to reflect adaptation to environments that differ in the frequency of stress events such as drought. Here we test this hypothesis in Heliophila (Brassicaceae), a diverse genus of flowering plants native to Africa, by integrating 34 years of satellite-based drought measurements with 2192 herbaria occurrence records. Consistent with predictions from classic life history theory, we find that perennial Heliophila species occur in environments where droughts are significantly less frequent compared to annuals. These associations are predictive while controlling for phylogeny, lending support to the hypothesis that drought related natural selection has influenced the distributions of these strategies. Additionally, the collection dates of annual and perennial species indicate that annuals escape drought prone seasons during the seed phase of their life cycle. Together, these findings provide empirical support for classic hypotheses about the drivers of life history strategy in plants - that perennials out compete annuals in environments with less frequent drought and that annuals are adapted to environments with more frequent drought by escaping drought prone seasons as seeds.

scholarly journals Measures of domain-specific resource allocations in life history strategy: Indicators of a latent common factor or ordered developmental sequence?

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafael Antonio Garcia ◽  
Tomas Cabeza de Baca ◽  
Candace Jasmine Black ◽  
Marcela Sotomayor-Peterson ◽  
Vanessa Smith-Castro ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Common Factor ◽  
Latent Trait ◽  
Life History Strategy ◽  
Life History Strategies ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Developmental Progression ◽  
Factor Modeling

The psychometric trait approach to human life history, based on common factor modeling, has recently come under some criticism for neglecting to inquire into the developmental progression that orients and executes human life history trajectories (Copping, Campbell, & Muncer, 2014).  It was asserted that the psychometric approach wholly focuses on creating a higher-order latent factor of life history by subsuming individual differences with developmental and social experiences, ignoring ontogenetic progression. Implicit in the critique is the assumption that developmental perspectives and latent approaches are mutually exclusive and incompatible with each other. The response to this critique by Figueredo and colleagues (2015) proposed instead that developmental perspectives and latent trait approaches are both compatible and necessary to further research on human life history strategies. The current paper uses three independent cross-sectional samples to examine whether models of human life history are best informed by a developmental perspective, psychometric trait approach, or both.

scholarly journals Implications of life-history strategies for obesity

2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (32) ◽  
pp. 8517-8522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon K. Maner ◽  
Andrea Dittmann ◽  
Andrea L. Meltzer ◽  
James K. McNulty
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Life History ◽  
Low Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Eating Behaviors ◽  
Behavioral Science ◽  
Life History Strategy ◽  
High Body Mass Index ◽  
Life History Strategies ◽  
Weight Problems

The association between low socioeconomic status (SES) and obesity is well documented. In the current research, a life history theory (LHT) framework provided an explanation for this association. Derived from evolutionary behavioral science, LHT emphasizes how variability in exposure to unpredictability during childhood gives rise to individual differences in a range of social psychological processes across the life course. Consistent with previous LHT research, the current findings suggest that exposure to unpredictability during childhood (a characteristic common to low SES environments) is associated with the adoption of a fast life-history strategy, one marked by impulsivity and a focus on short-term goals. We demonstrate that a fast life-history strategy, in turn, was associated with dysregulated weight-management behaviors (i.e., eating even in the absence of hunger), which were predictive of having a high body mass index (BMI) and being obese. In both studies, findings held while controlling for participants’ current socioeconomic status, suggesting that obesity is rooted in childhood experiences. A serial mediation model in study 2 confirmed that effects of childhood SES on adult BMI and obesity can be explained in part by exposure to unpredictability, the adoption of a fast life-history strategy, and dysregulated-eating behaviors. These findings suggest that weight problems in adulthood may be rooted partially in early childhood exposure to unpredictable events and environments. LHT provides a valuable explanatory framework for understanding the root causes of obesity.

scholarly journals Cyclical environments drive variation in life-history strategies: a general theory of cyclical phenology

2019 ◽  
Vol 286 (1898) ◽  
pp. 20190214 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Park
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Natural Populations ◽  
Life History Evolution ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Life History Strategies ◽  
Life History Variation ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Overwhelming Evidence ◽  
Phenological Shifts

Cycles, such as seasons or tides, characterize many systems in nature. Overwhelming evidence shows that climate change-driven alterations to environmental cycles—such as longer seasons—are associated with phenological shifts around the world, suggesting a deep link between environmental cycles and life cycles. However, general mechanisms of life-history evolution in cyclical environments are still not well understood. Here, I build a demographic framework and ask how life-history strategies optimize fitness when the environment perturbs a structured population cyclically and how strategies should change as cyclicality changes. I show that cycle periodicity alters optimality predictions of classic life-history theory because repeated cycles have rippling selective consequences over time and generations. Notably, fitness landscapes that relate environmental cyclicality and life-history optimality vary dramatically depending on which trade-offs govern a given species. The model tuned with known life-history trade-offs in a marine intertidal copepod Tigriopus californicus successfully predicted the shape of life-history variation across natural populations spanning a gradient of tidal periodicities. This framework shows how environmental cycles can drive life-history variation—without complex assumptions of individual responses to cues such as temperature—thus expanding the range of life-history diversity explained by theory and providing a basis for adaptive phenology.

scholarly journals Brief Self-Report Scales Assessing Life History Dimensions of Mating and Parenting Effort

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 147470491667384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Kruger
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Time Perspective ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Mating Effort ◽  
Life History Variation ◽  
K Factor ◽  
Parenting Effort

Life history theory (LHT) is a powerful evolutionary framework for understanding physiological, psychological, and behavioral variation both between and within species. Researchers and theorists are increasingly integrating LHT into evolutionary psychology, as it provides a strong foundation for research across many topical areas. Human life history variation has been represented in psychological and behavioral research in several ways, including indicators of conditions in the developmental environment, indicators of conditions in the current environment, and indicators of maturation and life milestones (e.g., menarche, initial sexual activity, first pregnancy), and in self-report survey scale measures. Survey scale measures have included constructs such as time perspective and future discounting, although the most widely used index is a constellation of indicators assessing the K-factor, thought to index general life history speed (from fast to slow). The current project examined the utility of two brief self-report survey measures assessing the life history dimensions of mating effort and parenting effort with a large undergraduate sample in the United States. Consistent with the theory, items reflected two inversely related dimensions. In regressions including the K-factor, the Mating Effort Scale proved to be a powerful predictor of other constructs and indicators related to life history variation. The Parenting Effort Scale had less predictive power overall, although it explained unique variance across several constructs and was the only unique predictor of the number of long-term (serious and committed) relationships. These scales may be valuable additions to self-report survey research projects examining life history variation.

scholarly journals On the Psychometric Study of Human Life History Strategies

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 147470491666684 ◽  
Author(s):  
George B. Richardson ◽  
Blair K. Sanning ◽  
Mark H. C. Lai ◽  
Lee T. Copping ◽  
Patrick H. Hardesty ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Structural Equation ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Life History Strategy ◽  
Life History Strategies ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
Psychometric Study ◽  
Mating Competition ◽  
Solid Ground

This article attends to recent discussions of validity in psychometric research on human life history strategy (LHS), provides a constructive critique of the extant literature, and describes strategies for improving construct validity. To place the psychometric study of human LHS on more solid ground, our review indicates that researchers should (a) use approaches to psychometric modeling that are consistent with their philosophies of measurement, (b) confirm the dimensionality of life history indicators, and (c) establish measurement invariance for at least a subset of indicators. Because we see confirming the dimensionality of life history indicators as the next step toward placing the psychometrics of human LHS on more solid ground, we use nationally representative data and structural equation modeling to test the structure of middle adult life history indicators. We found statistically independent mating competition and Super-K dimensions and the effects of parental harshness and childhood unpredictability on Super-K were consistent with past research. However, childhood socioeconomic status had a moderate positive effect on mating competition and no effect on Super-K, while unpredictability did not predict mating competition. We conclude that human LHS is more complex than previously suggested—there does not seem to be a single dimension of human LHS among Western adults and the effects of environmental components seem to vary between mating competition and Super-K.

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