Project description:The classification of kin into structured groups is a diverse phenomenon which is ubiquitous in human culture. For populations which are organized into large agropastoral groupings of sedentary residence but not governed within the context of a centralised state, such as our study sample of 83 historical Bantu-speaking groups of sub-Saharan Africa, cultural kinship norms guide all aspects of everyday life and social organization. Such rules operate in part through the use of differing terminological referential systems of familial organization. Although the cross-cultural study of kinship terminology was foundational in Anthropology, few modern studies have made use of statistical advances to further our sparse understanding of the structuring and diversification of terminological systems of kinship over time. In this study we use Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods of phylogenetic comparison to investigate the evolution of Bantu kinship terminology and reconstruct the ancestral state and diversification of cousin terminology in this family of sub-Saharan ethnolinguistic groups. Using a phylogenetic tree of Bantu languages, we then test the prominent hypothesis that structured variation in systems of cousin terminology has co-evolved alongside adaptive change in patterns of descent organization, as well as rules of residence. We find limited support for this hypothesis, and argue that the shaping of systems of kinship terminology is a multifactorial process, concluding with possible avenues of future research.
Project description:Kinship provides the fundamental structure of human society: descent determines the inheritance pattern between generations, whereas residence rules govern the location a couple moves to after they marry. In turn, descent and residence patterns determine other key relationships such as alliance, trade, and marriage partners. Hunter-gatherer kinship patterns are viewed as flexible, whereas agricultural societies are thought to have developed much more stable kinship patterns as they expanded during the Holocene. Among the Bantu farmers of sub-Saharan Africa, the ancestral kinship patterns present at the beginning of the expansion are hotly contested, with some arguing for matrilineal and matrilocal patterns, whereas others maintain that any kind of lineality or sex-biased dispersal only emerged much later. Here, we use Bayesian phylogenetic methods to uncover the history of Bantu kinship patterns and trace the interplay between descent and residence systems. The results suggest a number of switches in both descent and residence patterns as Bantu farming spread, but that the first Bantu populations were patrilocal with patrilineal descent. Across the phylogeny, a change in descent triggered a switch away from patrifocal kinship, whereas a change in residence triggered a switch back from matrifocal kinship. These results challenge "Main Sequence Theory," which maintains that changes in residence rules precede change in other social structures. We also indicate the trajectory of kinship change, shedding new light on how this fundamental structure of society developed as farming spread across the globe during the Neolithic.
Project description:For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly organized. Kinship terminology is the structured vocabulary used to classify, refer to, and address relatives and family. Diversity in kinship terminology has been analyzed by anthropologists for over 150 years, although recurrent patterning across cultures remains incompletely explained. Despite the wealth of kinship data in the anthropological record, comparative studies of kinship terminology are hindered by data accessibility. Here we present Kinbank, a new database of 210,903 kinterms from a global sample of 1,229 spoken languages. Using open-access and transparent data provenance, Kinbank offers an extensible resource for kinship terminology, enabling researchers to explore the rich diversity of human family organization and to test longstanding hypotheses about the origins and drivers of recurrent patterns. We illustrate our contribution with two examples. We demonstrate strong gender bias in the phonological structure of parent terms across 1,022 languages, and we show that there is no evidence for a coevolutionary relationship between cross-cousin marriage and bifurcate-merging terminology in Bantu languages. Analysing kinship data is notoriously challenging; Kinbank aims to eliminate data accessibility issues from that challenge and provide a platform to build an interdisciplinary understanding of kinship.
Project description:Kinship terminologies are the semantic systems of language that express kinship relations between individuals: in English, 'aunt' denotes a parent's sister. Theoretical models of kinship terminology diversity reduce over 10 billion possible organisations to six key types, each of which are hypothesised to be aligned with particular cultural norms of descent, marriage or residence patterns (Murdock, 1949). Often, terminological type is used to infer social patterns in past societies based on these putative relationships between kinship terminologies and social structure, and these associations are staples of 'Anthropology 101'. However, these relationships have not been scrutinised using modern comparative methods. Here we show that kinship terminologies vertically track language phylogeny in Austronesian, Bantu, and Uto-Aztecan, three languages families of different time-depths and environments. We find no unidirectional or universal models of evolution in kinship terminology. Of 18 existing anthropological coevolutionary theories regarding kinship terminology and cultural practices across 176 societies, we find only patchy support, and no evidence for putative universal drivers of evolution in kinship terminologies.
Project description:Although the role of lateral gene transfer is well recognized in the evolution of bacteria, it is generally assumed that it has had less influence among eukaryotes. To explore this hypothesis, we compare the dynamics of genome evolution in two groups of organisms: cyanobacteria and fungi. Ancestral genomes are inferred in both clades using two types of methods: first, Count, a gene tree unaware method that models gene duplications, gains and losses to explain the observed numbers of genes present in a genome; second, ALE, a more recent gene tree-aware method that reconciles gene trees with a species tree using a model of gene duplication, loss and transfer. We compare their merits and their ability to quantify the role of transfers, and assess the impact of taxonomic sampling on their inferences. We present what we believe is compelling evidence that gene transfer plays a significant role in the evolution of fungi.
Project description:Emergency medicine has increasingly focused on addressing social determinants of health (SDoH) in emergency medicine. However, efforts to standardize and evaluate measurement tools and compare results across studies have been limited by the plethora of terms (eg, SDoH, health-related social needs, social risk) and a lack of consensus regarding definitions. Specifically, the social risks of an individual may not align with the social needs of an individual, and this has ramifications for policy, research, risk stratification, and payment and for the measurement of health care quality. With the rise of social emergency medicine (SEM) as a field, there is a need for a simplified and consistent set of definitions. These definitions are important for clinicians screening in the emergency department, for health systems to understand service needs, for epidemiological tracking, and for research data sharing and harmonization. In this article, we propose a conceptual model for considering SDoH measurement and provide clear, actionable, definitions of key terms to increase consistency among clinicians, researchers, and policy makers.
Project description:Sperm whales have a multi-level social structure based upon long-term, cooperative social units. What role kinship plays in structuring this society is poorly understood. We combined extensive association data (518 days, during 2005-2016) and genetic data (18 microsatellites and 346 bp mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region sequences) for 65 individuals from 12 social units from the Eastern Caribbean to examine patterns of kinship and social behaviour. Social units were clearly matrilineally based, evidenced by greater relatedness within social units (mean r = 0.14) than between them (mean r = 0.00) and uniform mtDNA haplotypes within social units. Additionally, most individuals (82.5%) had a first-degree relative in their social unit, while we found no first-degree relatives between social units. Generally and within social units, individuals associated more with their closer relatives (matrix correlations: 0.18-0.25). However, excepting a highly related pair of social units that merged over the study period, associations between social units were not correlated with kinship (p > 0.1). These results are the first to robustly demonstrate kinship's contribution to social unit composition and association preferences, though they also reveal variability in association preferences that is unexplained by kinship. Comparisons with other matrilineal species highlight the range of possible matrilineal societies and how they can vary between and even within species.
Project description:Social Hymenoptera have played a leading role in development and testing of kin selection theory. Inclusive fitness models, following from Hamilton's rule, successfully predict major life history characteristics, such as biased sex investment ratios and conflict over parentage of male offspring. However, kin selection models poorly predict patterns of caste-biasing nepotism and reproductive skew within groups unless kin recognition constraints or group-level selection is also invoked. These successes and failures mirror the underlying kin recognition mechanisms. With reliable environmental cues, such as the sex of offspring or the origin of male eggs, predictions are supported. When only genetic recognition cues are potentially available, predictions are not supported. Mathematical simulations demonstrate that these differing mechanisms for determining kinship produce very different patterns of behavior. Decisions based on environmental cues for relatedness result in a robust mixture of cooperation and noncooperation depending on whether or not Hamilton's rule is met. In contrast, cooperation evolves under a wider range of conditions and to higher frequencies with genetic kin recognition as shared greenbeard traits. This "excess of niceness" matches the existing patterns in caste bias and reproductive skew; individuals often help others at an apparent cost to their inclusive fitness. The results further imply a potential for greenbeard-type kin recognition to create arbitrary runaway social selection for shared genetic traits. Suggestive examples in social evolution may be alloparental care and unicoloniality in ants. Differences in kin recognition mechanisms also can have consequences for maintenance of advantageous genetic diversity within populations.
Project description:In order to navigate the social world, children need to understand and make predictions about how people will interact with one another. Throughout most of human history, social groups have been prominently marked by kinship relations, but few experiments have examined children's knowledge of and reasoning about kinship relations. In the current studies, we investigated how 3- to 5-year-old children understand kinship relations, compared to non-kin relations between friends, with questions such as, "Who has the same grandmother?" We also tested how children expect people to interact based on their relations to one another, with questions such as "Who do you think Cara would like to share her treat with?" Both in a storybook context and in a richer context presenting more compelling cues to kinship using face morphology, 3- and 4-year-old children failed to show either robust explicit conceptual distinctions between kin and friends, or expectations of behavior favoring kin over friends, even when asked about their own social partners. By 5 years, children's understanding of these relations improved, and they showed some expectation that others will preferentially aid siblings over friends. Together, these findings suggest that explicit understanding of kinship develops slowly over the preschool years.
Project description:BackgroundLack of social support is associated with depression, anxiety, and insomnia. This study aimed to determine the source of support related to depression, anxiety, and insomnia among Japanese workers.MethodsAs part of a cohort study, we conducted a questionnaire survey among city government employees in Koka City, Shiga Prefecture, Japan, from September 2021 to March 2022. We used the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), and Insomnia Severity Index (ISI) to assess depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and insomnia, respectively. We used the Brief Job Stress Questionnaire (BJSQ) to assess job stressors and social support (from supervisors, colleagues, and family).ResultsA total of 1,852 Japanese employees (38.4% male, 45.9 ± 12.9 years) participated in the survey, with 15.5, 10.8, and 8.2% of the participants having depressive symptoms (PHQ-9 ≥ 10), anxiety symptoms (GAD-7 ≥ 10), and insomnia (ISI ≥ 15), respectively. The logistic regression analysis suggested that job stressors were associated with depressive symptoms (p < 0.001), anxiety symptoms (p < 0.001), and insomnia (p = 0.009). In contrast, support from co-workers (p = 0.016) and family members (p = 0.001) was associated with decreased depressive symptoms. Support from family members was associated with decreased insomnia (p = 0.005).ConclusionSocial support from co-workers and family may be associated with reduced depressive symptoms, and family support may be associated with reduced insomnia in the Japanese working population.Clinical trial registrationhttps://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03276585.