Building on the biocultural syntheses: 20 years and still expanding.

Human Biology in Britain

Human biology seeks to understand human variation and the biological, environmental, social, and historical influences on that variation. Views of the nature of both variation and environment have changed during the past 100 years. Typological approaches to nature and human diversity shifted to an evolutionary perspective during the first half of the 20th century. In the second half, widespread human biological variation was documented and interpreted in terms of adaptation to the environment. Environmental physiology and reproductive ecology continue to document environmental influences on human biological functioning, but with (1) an expanded concept of environment that acknowledges more fully the interactions among its physical, biotic, and social aspects and (2) an expanded theoretical basis, drawing on evolutionary ecology and life history theory, acknowledging tradeoffs and changing constraints and opportunities over the lifetime. Human biology gains from greater interaction with other fields, such as political ecology, but also contributes to them. [Keywords: biological anthropology, human ecology, adaptation, environmental physiology, reproductive ecology]

Anthropology offers a unique approach to looking at and understanding the world. The basis of anthropology lies in the study of the human condition, biological and cultural, and its diversity. The anthropological perspective provides a background that increases one's awareness of human biological variability. I view biological anthropology as focusing on three interrelated areas: evolution, population variability, and relationships among human biology, culture, and the environment. Increasingly, human biology is being applied in clinically related fields concerned with public health problems. Here I consider relationships between epidemiology and biological anthropology.

Biocultural approaches in anthropology originated from a desire to dissolve the nature/culture divide that is entrenched in the discipline. Whereas biocultural approaches were born under the umbrella of medical anthropology, by the late 1990s, biology‐centered approaches to bioculturalism had been mostly taken up by human biologists in biological anthropology. It was at this point that biology‐inclined approaches began to gel into an informal interdiscipline, biocultural anthropology. Much like any other discipline, biocultural anthropology developed research and professional norms with erected boundaries around acceptable work and workers. We draw from scholarly work in interdisciplinary studies to explore those norms and boundaries from the perspective of our collaborative, multimethod, and interdisciplinary project that combines “biology” and “culture” in unconventional ways. We provide examples of the obstacles, barriers, and risks we experienced and the costs exacted on the research project and the researchers due to the nature of our boundary crossings. By exploring biocultural anthropology from the edges of acceptability, we expose the unacknowledged boundary work in contemporary biocultural anthropology, and by extension, in its parent discipline, anthropology.

Biocultural approaches recognize the pervasiveness and dynamism of interactions between biological and cultural phenomena, and they explicitly strive to integrate biological, sociocultural, environmental, and other kinds of data. They have been part of human biology at least since 1958, when Frank Livingstone so elegantly explained the linkages among population growth, subsistence strategy, and the distribution of the sickle cell gene in West Africa. These approaches developed further with the advent of human adaptability studies in the 1960s as part of the Human Biological Program and have become increasingly focused on understanding the impacts of everyday life on human biological variation. Biocultural approaches generate explanations that are intuitively appealing to many because they offer a kind of holistic view. They can, however, be very challenging approaches to implement, perhaps in part because we are more experienced in measuring the biological than the cultural. Some of the challenges include (1) defining precisely what we mean by constructs like socioeconomic status, poverty, rural, and urban; (2) operationalizing key variables so that they can be measured in ways that are ethnographically valid as well as replicable; (3) defining and measuring multiple causal pathways. In this paper, I briefly review the history of biocultural approaches and then illustrate some of the challenges that these approaches present with examples from my own research on nutrition and energetics as well as that of other practitioners.

Anthropology, with its dual emphasis on biology and culture, is--or should be--the discipline most suited to the study of the complex interactions between these aspects of our lives. Unfortunately, since the early decades of this century, biological and cultural anthropology have grown distinct, and a holistic vision of anthropology has suffered. This book brings culture and biology back together in new and refreshing ways. Directly addressing earlier criticisms of biological anthropology, Building a New Biocultural Synthesis concerns how culture and political economy affect human biology--e.g., people's nutritional status, the spread of disease, exposure to pollution--and how biological consequences might then have further effects on cultural, social, and economic systems. Contributors to the volume offer case studies on health, nutrition, and violence among prehistoric and historical peoples in the Americas; theoretical chapters on nonracial approaches to human variation and the development of critical, humanistic and political ecological approaches in biocultural anthropology; and explorations of biological conditions in contemporary societies in relationship to global changes. Building a New Biocultural Synthesis will sharpen and enrich the relevance of anthropology for understanding a wide variety of struggles to cope with and combat persistent human suffering. It should appeal to all anthropologists and be of interest to sister disciplines such as nutrition and sociology. Alan H. Goodman is Professor of Anthropology, Hampshire College. Thomas L. Leatherman is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of South Carolina.

For decades, insight into fundamental principles of human biology and disease has been obtained primarily by experiments in animal models. While this has allowed researchers to understand many human biological processes in great detail, some developmental and disease mechanisms have proven difficult to study due to inherent species differences. The advent of organoid technology more than 10 years ago has established laboratory-grown organ tissues as an additional model system to recapitulate human-specific aspects of biology. The use of human 3D organoids, as well as other advances in single-cell technologies, has revealed unprecedented insights into human biology and disease mechanisms, especially those that distinguish humans from other species. This review highlights novel advances in organoid biology with a focus on how organoid technology has generated a better understanding of human-specific processes in development and disease.

Human Variation and Biocultural Adaptation in Papua New GuineaHuman Biology in Papua New Guinea: The Small Cosmos.Robert D. Attenborough , Michael P. Alpers

Paul T. Baker (1927–2007) was a leader in transforming biological anthropology and human biology from descriptive endeavors to a comparative biology of humans on the basis of evolutionary principles. He was a Professor of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University from 1958 to 1996, where his major scientific interest was how human biological and physiological variation is structured by responses to environmental and sociocultural stressors. Exploring responses to climatic and social stressors at the population level, early in his career Baker integrated ecological and evolutionary theory and later defined the subdiscipline of human population biology as a transdisciplinary science with the goal of understanding how human variation is patterned in modern populations. On the basis of his multiple contributions to elucidating genetic, environmental, and sociocultural inputs to human variability in health, physical function, and longevity and his leadership in multiple transdisciplinary research projects, including the International Biological Programme, in 1980 Baker was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Across populations, human morbidity and mortality risks generally follow clear gradients, with socially-disadvantaged individuals and groups tending to have higher morbidity and mortality at all life stages relative to those more socially advantaged. Anthropologists specialize in understanding the proximate and ultimate factors that shape variation in human biological functioning and health and are therefore well-situated to explore the relationships between social position and health in diverse ecological and cultural contexts. While human biologists have developed sophisticated methods for assessing health using minimally-invasive methods, at a disciplinary level, we have room for conceptual and methodological improvement in how we frame, measure, and analyze the social inequities that might shape health inequities. This toolkit paper elaborates on some steps human biologists should take to enhance the quality of our research on health inequities. Specifically, we address: (1) how to frame unequal health outcomes (i.e., inequalities vs. disparities vs. inequities) and the importance of identifying our conceptual models of how these inequities emerge; (2) how to measure various axes of social inequities across diverse cultural contexts, and (3) approaches to community collaboration and dissemination. We end by discussing (4) future directions in human biology research of health inequities, including understanding the ultimate causes of sensitivity to social inequities and transitioning from research to action.

The study of human biology includes exploration of all the genetic and environmental influences on human variation and life history, including impacts of sociocultural and physical environments. Religious practice and spirituality may be one of these influences. There are more than 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children, accounting for 84% of the world's 6.9 billion people. Furthermore, 70% of Americans consider themselves spiritual in some way, including 22% who do not consider themselves religious, and the numbers for Europe are lower but proportionally similar. Such a high rate of religious affiliation and spiritual belief suggests that religion and spirituality could be sociocultural influences on human variation, but human biologists have scarcely attended to their impacts, as indicated by the limited numbers of relevant articles in the two flagship human biology journals. In this article, we discuss why human biologists may have overlooked this important force for human variability and highlight foundational work from human biology and other disciplines that can give our colleagues directions forward. We review the impacts of religion and spirituality at population and individual levels and call for human biologists to attend to the many aspects of religion and spirituality that can impact human biology and are much more than simply influences of denominational affiliation.

Introducing a special issue on "Translating Human Biology," we pose two basic questions: Is human biology addressing the most critical challenges facing our species? How can the processes of translating our science be improved and innovated? We analyze articles published in American Journal of Human Biology from 2004-2013, and find there is very little human biological consideration of issues related to most of the core human challenges such as water, energy, environmental degradation, or conflict. There is some focus on disease, and considerable focus on food/nutrition. We then introduce this special volume with reference to the following articles that provide exemplars for the process of how translation and concern for broader context and impacts can be integrated into research. Human biology has significant unmet potential to engage more fully in translation for the public good, through consideration of the topics we focus on, the processes of doing our science, and the way we present our domain expertise.

Understanding of both intra‐ and interpopulation variation in human biology depends heavily upon the use of objective, quantitative measures. Qualitative measures, such as the presence or absence of specific alleles or phenotypic traits, are also utilized by biological anthropologists. The measurements used must be repeatable, accurate, and appropriate for the circumstances of the research project in which they are employed. Contemporary human biology research utilizes both measures that have been used for many decades, but also may employ new technology that permits measurement of phenomena that were impossible to quantify in the past. Field conditions may limit what measurements can be used.

Demography, biological anthropology, and human biology Demography, broadly defined, is the study of human populations, with a focus on their fertility, mortality, migration, distribution, and change in size and composition. Fertility or natality is generally defined as the act of childbearing; mortality is death, whereas morbidity is disease. Migration is the movement of people from one place to another. Fertility, mortality, and migration all affect a population's distribution, its size, and its composition (Swedlund and Armelagos, 1976). Some authors prefer to emphasize that demography is quantitative in nature (Riley and McCarthy, 2003; Swedlund and Armelagos, 1976), some that the focus on fertility, morbidity, mortality, and migration is aimed at understanding the structure of human groups (Harrison and Boyce, 1972), and others that the primary focus of demography is the study of mortality and fertility transitions (Beaver, 1975). There are many excellent books on demography and its methods, and the reader is referred to them for a background on the field (Riley and McCarthy, 2003; Rives and Serow, 1984; Shryock et al ., 1976; Siegel and Swanson, 2004; Stycos, 1989). We will not discuss the computation of demographic rates or any other methodological tools. The fields of biological anthropology and human biology have many interests that intersect with demography. Indeed, there are several sources that focus on demographic anthropology (Basu and Aaby, 1998; Dyke and Morrill, 1980; Kertzer and Fricke, 1997a, 1997b; Renne, 1994; Roth, 2004; Swedlund, 1978; Swedlund and Armelagos, 1976; Zubrow, 1976), historical/genealogical demography (Dyke and Morrill, 1980), and even on archive-based human biological research (Herring and Swedlund, 2003).

The year 2016 in biological anthropology represented a return to the methodical study of classic questions and increased integrative team-based research that utilizes multiple methodological approaches. This review is not comprehensive, but rather highlights several papers that reflect trends in four areas of research within biological anthropology: paleoanthropology, primatology, human biology, and anthropological genetics. Methodological innovation enabled scholars in paleoanthropology to tackle questions once hampered by small sample size. Primatologists approached studies of behavior and reproduction with the rigor characteristic of the subdiscipline, while paying increasing attention to anthropogenic influences on primate habitats. Like their colleagues in paleoanthropology, human biologists also returned to enduring questions regarding reproduction, human adaptation, and behavior, including, notably, a focus on variability in cultural practice and meaning, as well as resource inequity. The publications representing anthropological genetics signify a movement toward an incorporation of multiple lines of evidence in our understanding of human and nonhuman primate ancestry. In total, these papers reveal shifts in biological anthropology toward research that is increasingly aware of the limits of siloed science and attuned to addressing issues salient to the populations and communities in which we work. [comparative morphology, Anthropocene, anthropological genetics, human biology]