Abstract
Researchers across the social sciences have long been interested in families. How people make decisions such as who to marry, when to have a baby, how big or small a family to have, or whether to stay with a partner or stray are questions that continue to interest economists, sociologists, demographers, and anthropologists. Human families vary across the globe; different cultures have different marriage practices, different ideas about who raises children, and even different notions of what a family is. Human behavioral ecology is a branch of anthropology that is particularly interested in cultural variation of family systems and how these differences impact upon the people that inhabit them; the children, parents, grandparents. It draws on evolutionary theory to direct research and generate testable hypotheses to uncover how different ecologies, including social contexts, can explain diversity in families. In this Special Issue on the behavioral ecology of the family, we have collated a selection of papers that showcase just how useful this framework is for understanding cultural variation in families, which we hope will convince other social scientists interested in family research to draw upon evolutionary and ecological insight in their own work.
Highlights
In this Special Issue, we showcase how using the evolutionary framework of human behavioral ecology (HBE) can provide deeper insight on human families
Is a key area of focus in HBE, including family formation, investment in children, conflict/cooperation among family members, and how cultural institutions influence all parts of family life
HBE, which provides a unified theoretical framework of optimizing fitness using costs and benefits, may provide insights into the integrated set of features that is the human family. In this Special Issue, we illustrate the benefits of applying a theoretical framework to create directed research that can complement data-driven methods so commonly used in other social sciences such as demography and quantitative sociology
Summary
In this Special Issue, we showcase how using the evolutionary framework of human behavioral ecology (HBE) can provide deeper insight on human families. HBE researchers examine reproductive decision-making to understand the demographic transition (e.g., Borgerhoff Mulder 1998) Another strength of adopting ecological theory is to think about behaviors as adaptive choices for a given ecology. This is known as the naturalistic fallacy and thinking that what happens is ‘natural’ and must be morally right, is a misguided (and even damaging) use of evolutionary theory in understanding human behavior In this special issue we hope to convince researchers across the social sciences that the HBE approach can bear rich fruit for those studying human social behavior, by showcasing here its value in family research
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