Energy-poverty-inequality SDGs: A large-scale household analysis and forecasting in China.

Affordable and clean energy, eliminating poverty, and reducing inequality are important goals of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper examines the role of access to clean cooking fuels in promoting income growth and reducing income inequality. Using data from Chinese households, we show that a 10% increase in the adoption of clean cooking fuels would result in an increase in total annual household income of US$37 billion nationwide.

Cultural transmission, networks, and clusters among Austronesian-speaking peoples.

With its linguistic and cultural diversity, Austronesia is important in the study of evolutionary forces that generate and maintain cultural variation. By analysing publicly available datasets, we have identified four classes of cultural features in Austronesia and distinct clusters within each class. We hypothesized that there are differing modes of transmission and patterns of variation in these cultural classes and that geography alone would be insufficient to explain some of these patterns of variation.

Genes, culture, and scientific racism.

Quantitative studies of cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution (henceforth "CE" and "GCC") emerged in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the "race and intelligence quotient (IQ)" and "human sociobiology" debates, as a counter to extreme hereditarian positions. These studies incorporated cultural transmission and its interaction with genetics in contributing to patterns of human variation. Neither CE nor GCC results were consistent with racist claims of ubiquitous genetic differences between socially defined races.

Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.

Theories of how humans came to be so ecologically dominant increasingly centre on the adaptive abilities of human culture and its capacity for cumulative change and high-fidelity transmission. Here we revisit this hypothesis by comparing human culture with animal cultures and cases of epigenetic inheritance and parental effects. We first conclude that cumulative change and high transmission fidelity are not unique to human culture as previously thought, and so they are unlikely to explain its adaptive qualities.

The refinement paradox and cumulative cultural evolution: Complex products of collective improvement favor conformist outcomes, blind copying, and hyper-credulity.

Social learning is common in nature, yet cumulative culture (where knowledge and technology increase in complexity and diversity over time) appears restricted to humans. To understand why, we organized a computer tournament in which programmed entries specified when to learn new knowledge and when to refine (i.e.

Illuminating sustainable household well-being and natural resource dependence in the case of disaster resettlement in rural China.

In order to transform rural development, the implementation of disaster resettlement projects should not only reduce environmental hazards, but also improve the sustainability of natural resources and household well-being. This article assesses sustainable household well-being (SHWB) and natural resource dependence using a quantitative survey of rural China. It identifies four classes of relationship between SHWB and natural resource dependence and explores the impact of disaster resettlement on these classes.

Cultural transmission, competition for prey, and the evolution of cooperative hunting.

Although cooperative hunting is widespread among animals, its benefits are unclear. At low frequencies, cooperative hunting may allow predators to escape competition and access bigger prey that could not be caught by a lone cooperative predator. Cooperative hunting is a more successful strategy when it is common, but its spread can result in overhunting big prey, which may have a lower per-capita growth rate than small prey.

On random conformity bias in cultural transmission of polychotomous traits.

Mathematical models of conformity and anti-conformity have commonly included a set of simplifying assumptions. For example, (1) there are m=2 cultural variants in the population, (2) naive individuals observe the cultural variants of n=3 adult "role models," and (3) individuals' levels of conformity or anti-conformity do not change over time. Three recent theoretical papers have shown that departures from each of these assumptions can produce new population dynamics.

Drowning in shallow causality.

It has been known for decades that inference concerning genetic causes of human behavioral phenotypes cannot be legitimately made from correlations among relatives. We claim that these inferential difficulties cannot be overcome by assigning different names to causes inferred from within-family and population-level genome-wide association studies (GWASs). For educational attainment, for example, unraveling gene-environment interactions requires more than new names for causes.

Age-differentiated incentives for adaptive behavior during epidemics produce oscillatory and chaotic dynamics.

Heterogeneity in contact patterns, mortality rates, and transmissibility among and between different age classes can have significant effects on epidemic outcomes. Adaptive behavior in response to the spread of an infectious pathogen may give rise to complex epidemiological dynamics. Here we model an infectious disease in which adaptive behavior incentives, and mortality rates, can vary between two and three age classes.

Infectious diseases may have arrested the southward advance of microblades in Upper Palaeolithic East Asia.

An unsolved archaeological puzzle of the East Asian Upper Palaeolithic is why the southward expansion of an innovative lithic technology represented by microblades stalled at the Qinling-Huaihe Line. It has been suggested that the southward migration of foragers with microblades stopped there, which is consistent with ancient DNA studies showing that populations to the north and south of this line had differentiated genetically by 19 000 years ago. Many infectious pathogens are believed to have been associated with hominins since the Palaeolithic, and zoonotic pathogens in particular are prevalent at lower latitudes, which may have produced a disease barrier.

Evolutionary modeling suggests that addictions may be driven by competition-induced microbiome dysbiosis.

Recent studies revealed mechanisms by which the microbiome affects its host's brain, behavior and wellbeing, and that dysbiosis - persistent microbiome-imbalance - is associated with the onset and progress of various chronic diseases, including addictive behaviors. Yet, understanding of the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape the host-microbiome ecosystem and affect the host state, is still limited. Here we propose that competition dynamics within the microbiome, associated with host-microbiome mutual regulation, may promote dysbiosis and aggravate addictive behaviors.

Cultural niche construction with application to fertility control: A model for education and social transmission of contraceptive use.

The evolution of a cultural trait may be affected by niche construction, or changes in the selective environment of that trait due to the inheritance of other cultural traits that make up a cultural background. This study investigates the evolution of a cultural trait, such as the acceptance of the idea of contraception, that is both vertically and horizontally transmitted within a homogeneous social network. Individuals may conform to the norm, and adopters of the trait have fewer progeny than others.

Conformity and anti-conformity in a finite population.

Conformist and anti-conformist cultural transmission have been studied both empirically, in several species, and theoretically, with population genetic models. Building upon standard, infinite-population models (IPMs) of conformity, we introduce finite-population models (FPMs) and study them via simulation and a diffusion approximation. In previous IPMs of conformity, offspring observe the variants of n adult role models, where n is often three.

Conditions that favour cumulative cultural evolution.

The emergence of human societies with complex language and cumulative culture is considered a major evolutionary transition. Why such a high degree of cumulative culture is unique to humans is perplexing given the potential fitness advantages of cultural accumulation. Here, Boyd & Richerson's (1996 Why culture is common, but cultural evolution is rare.

A memetic algorithm for finding multiple subgraphs that optimally cover an input network.

Finding dense subgraphs is a central problem in graph mining, with a variety of real-world application domains including biological analysis, financial market evaluation, and sociological surveys. While a series of studies have been devoted to finding subgraphs with maximum density, the problem of finding multiple subgraphs that best cover an input network has not been systematically explored. The present study discusses a variant of the densest subgraph problem and presents a mathematical model for optimizing the total coverage of an input network by extracting multiple subgraphs.

How Family Living Arrangements and Migration Distances Shape the Settlement Intentions of Rural Migrant Workers in China.

Rural migrant workers and their families will decide the future of China's urbanization. Using data from the "China Migrants Dynamic Survey and Hundreds of Villages Investigation" carried out in 2018, we examine whether and how family living arrangements and migration distances shape rural migrant workers' settlement intentions in urban areas. In general, rural migrant workers' settlement intention is shown to be weak.

Differential application of cultural practices at the family and individual levels may alter heritability estimates.

Uchiyama et al. emphasize that culture evolves directionally and differentially as a function of selective pressures in different populations. Extending these principles to the level of families, lineages, and individuals exposes additional challenges to estimating heritability.

How Does Migration Affect HIV Sexual Risk Behaviors Among Involuntary Bachelors? The Mediating Roles of Neighborhoods and Social Networks.

The sex ratio imbalance in China since the 1980s has resulted in a large number of involuntary bachelors in rural China. Previous studies have found an association between migration and HIV sexual risk behaviors among involuntary bachelors, but how migration affects these bachelors' HIV sexual risk behaviors remain poorly understood. Using data from a cross-sectional survey in 2017 (a sample of 740 male respondents who had rural household registration, had never been married, and were aged 28-49 years), we investigated the relationship between migration and HIV sexual risk behaviors.

Success-biased social learning in a one-consumer, two-resource model.

Previous analyses have predicted that social learning should not evolve in a predator-prey system. Here we examine whether success-biased social learning, by which social learners copy successful demonstrators, allows social learning by foragers to evolve. We construct a one-predator, two-prey system in which foragers must learn how to feed on depletable prey populations in an environment where foraging information can be difficult to obtain individually.

Short-Term Dairy Product Elimination and Reintroduction Minimally Perturbs the Gut Microbiota in Self-Reported Lactose-Intolerant Adults.

An outstanding question regarding the human gut microbiota is whether and how microbiota-directed interventions influence host phenotypic traits. Here, we employed a dietary intervention to probe this question in the context of lactose intolerance. To assess the effects of dietary dairy product elimination and (re)introduction on the microbiota and host phenotype, we studied 12 self-reported mildly lactose-intolerant adults with triweekly collection of fecal samples over a 12-week study period: 2 weeks of baseline diet, 4 weeks of dairy product elimination, and 6 weeks of gradual whole cow milk (re)introduction.

Diversity and its causes: Lewontin on racism, biological determinism and the adaptationist programme.

Lewontin's 1972 paper (RC Lewontin, 1972 , in (eds T Dobzhansky, MK Hecht, WC Steere), pp. 381-398) can be viewed as one foray in his battle against biological determinism. Our paper shows where Lewontin, , fits in the debate over human classification that it stimulated.