Human behavioral ecology and its evil twin

Abstract

Human behavioral evolutionary studies tend to interpret behavioral diversity in terms of either “culture” or ecology. Although human behavioral ecology and cultural evolution seem to be different fields, their protagonists often taking different approaches and generating different conclusions, they are in fact 2 kinds of explanation that are hard to tell apart in the real world. Many studies of the evolution of human behavior situate behavior in the context of ecological, cultural, and social environments. The task now is to test explicit evolutionary models against real-world data, preferably on different scales. Cultural phylogenetics and social network analysis have been employed to help in this task, used within the framework of behavioral ecology.