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Evolutionary anthropology provides a powerful theoretical framework for understanding how both current environments and legacies of past selection shape human behavioral diversity. This integrative and pluralistic field, combining ethnographic, demographic, and sociological methods, has provided new insights into the ultimate forces and proximate pathways that guide human adaptation and variation. Here, we present the argument that evolutionary anthropological studies of human behavior also hold great, largely untapped, potential to guide the design, implementation, and evaluation of social and public health policy. Focusing on the key anthropological themes of reproduction, production, and distribution we highlight classic and recent research demonstrating the value of an evolutionary perspective to improving human well-being. The challenge now comes in transforming relevance into action and, for that, evolutionary behavioral anthropologists will need to forge deeper connections with other applied social scientists and policy-makers. We are hopeful that these developments are underway and that, with the current tide of enthusiasm for evidence-based approaches to policy, evolutionary anthropology is well positioned to make a strong contribution.

Is fertility relevant to evolutionary analyses conducted in modern industrial societies? This question has been the subject of a highly contentious debate, beginning in the late 1980s and continuing to this day. Researchers in both evolutionary and social sciences have argued that the measurement of fitness-related traits (e.g., fertility) offers little insight into evolutionary processes, on the grounds that modern industrial environments differ so greatly from those of our ancestral past that our behavior can no longer be expected to be adaptive. In contrast, we argue that fertility measurements in industrial society are essential for a complete evolutionary analysis: in particular, such data can provide evidence for any putative adaptive mismatch between ancestral environments and those of the present day, and they can provide insight into the selection pressures currently operating on contemporary populations. Having made this positive case, we then go on to discuss some challenges of fertility-related analyses among industrialized populations, particularly those that involve large-scale databases. These include "researcher degrees of freedom" (i.e., the choices made about which variables to analyze and how) and the different biases that may exist in such data. Despite these concerns, large datasets from multiple populations represent an excellent opportunity to test evolutionary hypotheses in great detail, enriching the evolutionary understanding of human behavior.

Golley examines human populations from the perspective of ecological science. Ecology can provide insight into the study of human population for at least 4 reasons: 1) Ecologists can experiment with their subjects in the laboratory and the field. 2) Ecologists have tended to ignore distinctions between animal and human populations and reason by analogy from their experimental and field studies of animal population to humans. 3) Ecologists enjoyed sudden popularity in the 1960s and 1970s with worldwide recognition of the environmental crisis. 4) Ecology employs a variety of metaphors that can be usefully adapted to the study of human populations. 3 ecological issues are directly relevant to studying human population: 1) resources as a limitation on growth 2) the adverse effects of high population growth rates and 3) the impact of human population growth on the environment. Ecologists often have a pessimistic view of further human development while technologists have faith in human rationality and creativity in solving ecological problems. These 2 themes form the basis of one of the unresolved debates of human history with uncertain consequences for human survival.

Another Unique Species: Patterns in Human Evolutionary Ecology. by Robert Foley Longman: 1987. Pp. 313. Pbk a£12.95. To be published in the United States in December by Wiley, provisional price $32.95.

How do biological, psychological, sociological, and cultural factors combine to change societies over the long run? Boyd and Richerson explore how genetic and cultural factors interact, under the influence of evolutionary forces, to produce the diversity we see in human cultures. Using methods developed by population biologists, they propose a theory of cultural evolution that is an original and fair-minded alternative to the sociobiology debate.

(1950). Human Ecology—A Theory of Community Structure. Economic Geography: Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 328-330.

THE interest of men of science in the study of human relationships is growing apace, much to the benefit of sociology. Sociologists have in the past been far too prone to assume that their subject can be developed in the library ; social philosophy has steadily progressed as a result, while social science, properly so called, has lagged behind. Human Ecology The Science of Social Adjustment. By Thomas Robertson. Pp. xx+534. (Glasgow: William Maclellan (Publishers), Ltd., 1948.) 21s.