John H. Shaver

Is it kava or us? Kava use at Otago The University of Otago needs to develop a kava policy  Patrick Vakaoti  writes. Nothing about us, without us, is the idea that no policy should be...

gunu mai, qase levu, gunu mai!
www.odt.co.nz/opinion/it-k...

The “I” in egalitarianism: Hadza hunter-gatherers averse to inequality primarily when personally unfavorable Abstract. Many economists contend that humans have strong, universal, other-regarding equality preferences with deep evolutionary roots. Indeed, many hunte

📢 New Paper 🚨

Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life.

In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus.

bit.ly/4kvLOwA

Religious parents receive more alloparental aid in rural Bangladesh | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core Religious parents receive more alloparental aid in rural Bangladesh - Volume 8

Men and women in rural Bangladesh use gender-specific kinds of religious practices to elicit more alloparental support from their religious networks. | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core - www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Baylor researchers take R1 research into local schools to inspire the next generation The research being done at Baylor impacts lives on multiple levels. There are the people who benefit directly from the research itself -- the people served by improved water quality, or mental health ...

For National STEM day, Baylor's educator's have been taking their research into high school, middle school and elementary school classrooms across the county!

Here's our very own Sam Urlacher who led students at Mart Elementary School, measuring human energetics.

www2.baylor.edu/baylorproud/...

I'm pleased to announce that Natalie Munro and I have authored an Element through @universitypress.cambridge.org on "The Behavioral Ecology of Food: Bridging the Archaeological and the Contemporary."

It will be released in February, and you can pre-order it here: www.cambridge.org/core/books/b...

Interested in doing a PhD with Baylor Anthropology? This week we’ll be showcasing our faculty starting with John, Julie and Duncan (That’s me!).

We’ve prepared info sheets with contact info and research specialisms. Any further questions, please drop us an email.

Excited to get this paper published! 🌟

We argue that men exaggerate patriarchal beliefs in an effort to signal conformity to others, which in turn fuels misperceptions about peers - making patriarchal norms resistant to change.

royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

📣 New BBS preprint out now! 📣

"Models casting egalitarian societies as crucibles of equality perpetuate the factually uninformed notion that foragers are somehow more noble. Critiques portray egalitarianism as romantic fantasy. Neither characterization is wholly justified."

doi.org/10.1017/S014...

“A snake with no teeth”: Urbanization shifts perceptions of men who support women’s empowerment in Northwestern Tanzania Achieving gender equality requires the support of all genders, but efforts to engage men in women’s empowerment initiatives have been fraught with res…

🚨 🐍 Our new paper on the consequences men face when countering patriarchal norms in rural Tanzania 🐍.🚨

We carried out focus groups and detailed interviews with a whopping 172 women and men about their perceptions of men who support women's empowerment... 📝 1/5

"Modeling Uncertainty around Free-list Cultural Salience Scores" by @rcc-au.bsky.social's @djsmith90.bsky.social and @bgpurzycki.bsky.social OnlineFirst up now at Field Methods journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... #AnthroTools #quantethnography

If one man marries two women, another man must go unmarried, right? No. Demography matters. If sex ratios are skewed towards women, then polygyny can exist alongside universal marriage for men (who want to marry women). If only more people understood demography 😊

Title slide of Mary's talk: Grandmothers, siblings and the quantity-quality tradeoff in human fertility: How allocare shapes fertility in the context of high social competition

Mary Shenk presented at the Evolutionary Demography Society conference in Oxford today, showing intriguing (and opposite) associations between women's fertility and allocare from either grandparents or children

The role of parental religiosity in shaping paternal investment: evidence from Bangladesh and India | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Among humans, paternal investment has been shown to enhance both fertility and offspring survival. While psychological and ecological influences on human paternal investment are relatively well docume...

New paper from the team, led by Radim Chvaja:

The role of parental religiosity in shaping paternal investment: evidence from Bangladesh and India

doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Children's Caregiving and Growth in Northwestern Tanzania: Limited Evidence That Support From Specific Caregivers Is Associated With Better Growth Receiving care from individuals other than one's mother (i.e., allomothering) is a universal aspect of raising children, but whether and how such care impacts children's health remains subject to deb...

New paper led by @anushe.bsky.social on alloparenting in Tanzania. Child care assistance surely benefits child health, but we find little evidence that specific care arrangements are more resilient than others.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Interested in examining culture, cultural models, and what people think, know, and believe? New book from RCC’s @bgpurzycki.bsky.social coming soon as part of Sage’s “Little Green Book” series!

collegepublishing.sagepub.com/products/eth...

8 men and women stand together in front of a hospital building

Need To Know Basis is launched ! The team is now working on data collection in the Farafenni region of The Gambia. Thank you to the team for all their work in the field and for their sensitivity asking men and women about information sharing and FGC!

Religion, Brain & Behavior adopts stricter transparency standards Published in Religion, Brain & Behavior (Vol. 14, No. 4, 2024)

“Social-science journals have a key role to play: they must prioritize transparency to improve the credibility and verifiability of published research” www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A practical guide to cross-cultural and multi-sited data collection in the biological and behavioural sciences | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Researchers in the biological and behavioural sciences are increasingly conducting collaborative, multi-sited projects to address how phenomena vary across ecologies. These types of projects, however, pose additional workflow challenges beyond those ...

Also follow PI @johnhshaver.bsky.social as well as @lspake.bsky.social & @anushe.bsky.social, without whom that data would not exist! Here's a paper led by Laure and Anushé describing the process of data collection in our 5 main locations royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

We are 'The Evolutionary Dynamics of Religion, Family Size and Child Success' project, an international team investigating how religion impacts fertility and child wellbeing. Check out our website for more info, and follow us for updates on our activities 💙
evolutionarydemographyofreligion.org

Our project on the evolutionary dynamics of religion, family size and child success is now on bluesky 👇 Follow for updates on our cross-cultural research, which is getting to a particularly exciting stage of paper-writing 😊 (after a long slog of data collection in 6 countries!)

The evolutionary demography of religion project is on bluesky! Give it a follow for content about religion, cooperation and prosociality, allomothering, and maternal and child outcomes 👇

bsky.app/profile/evod...

Introduction: The Influences of Religion and Spirituality on Human Biology The objective of this special issue is to highlight the absence of religion and spirituality in the human biological enterprise. We have assembled a set of articles covering physiology, psychology, c...

Special issue of American Journal of Human Biology on 'The Influences of Religion and Spirituality on Human Biology' onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

SoS 224: Dr. John Shaver navigates religiosity, fertility, and family support Play SoS 224: Dr. John Shaver navigates religiosity, fertility, and family support by Human Biology Association on desktop and mobile. Play over 320 million tracks for free on SoundCloud.

Check out this episode of SoS! @johnhshaver.bsky.social speaks about his research and one of the papers from the Evolutionary Demography of Religion project: m.soundcloud.com/humanbiology...

We all know that – alongside global warming, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin and other evils – selection bias is one of the largest threats to humanity*

But how bad exactly is selection bias?

This is what we aimed to explore in our recent paper: doi.org/10.1080/2153...

*Perhaps a slight exaggeration…

Blog from @johnhshaver.bsky.social @lspake.bsky.social & Radim Chvaja about our recent paper on associations between religiosity, fertility and childcare from fathers and others in the Gambia. Nice, clear summary of a complex set of analyses 😊

evolutionarydemographyofreligion.org/religion-in-...