An evolutionary perspective on social inequality and health disparities: Insights from the producer-scrounger game.

ABSTRACT: There is growing concern with social disparities in health, whether relating to gender, ethnicity, caste, socio-economic position or other axes of inequality. Despite addressing inequality, evolutionary biologists have had surprisingly little to say on why human societies are prone to demonstrating exploitation. This article builds on a recent book, 'The Metabolic Ghetto', describing an overarching evolutionary framework for studying all forms of social inequality involving exploitation. The dynamic 'producer-scrounger' game, developed to model social foraging, assumes that some members of a social group produce food, and that others scrounge from them. An evolutionary stable strategy emerges when neither producers nor scroungers can increase their Darwinian fitness by changing stra

SUBMITTER: Wells JCK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10482145 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature