Articles in 2018

The scientific community needs to engage actively in the debate regarding the status of video game loot boxes and the potential risks they present for vulnerable populations.

A study finds association between the occurrence of intimate partner violence and marital fertility among Tsimané forager-horticulturalists, independent of proximate explanations, suggesting that intimate partner violence may persist as an evolutionary strategy to enhance male fitness.

Human infants need a social environment to survive as they rely on caregivers to maintain allostasis. This Perspective proposes that the need of others to regulate physiological changes determines brain development, not only in the social domain.

A study of intimate partner violence among the Tsimané forager-horticulturalists of Bolivia finds evidence that male aggression is leveraged to increase marital fertility and a man’s individual fitness when spouses differ in preferred family size.

Rutherford et al. analyse temporal, network and hierarchical effects to uncover, understand and quantify competing mechanisms of constitutional change worldwide.

New research shows that historical notions of scientific inferiority still underlie contemporary beliefs about scientific talent, or lack of it, in women and minority groups. If we do not address these biases, we are upholding an unhealthy system, argues Heather Metcalf.

Revelations of sexual harassment, sexism and unequal pay in film and broadcasting have called ‘time’s up’ on the myths of egalitarianism that circulate about the creative sector, argues Rosalind Gill.

Cullati and colleagues propose a framework to understand vulnerability in later life as a product of biological, psychological, cognitive, emotional, economical and relational ‘reserves’ built up over a lifetime, which can be called on to buffer against or recover from adversity.

The success of humans as the last surviving species of the hominin clade may be explained by our ecological plasticity. Roberts and Stewart review evidence for human dispersal 300,000–12,000 years before present and propose that humans thrived via a unique ‘generalist specialist’ ecological niche.

By analysing whether characteristics of Austronesian populations could predict the rate of adoption of Christianity, researchers find that political leadership and small population sizes facilitated Christianity’s spread in the Pacific.

Humans can recognize emotions from facial expressions. Brooks and Freeman investigate the link between conceptual representation and visual perception of emotions and show that emotions that are represented as conceptually similar are perceived as similar.

Theories about the spread of Christianity are tested using comparative cross-cultural methods and historical data on 70 Austronesian cultures. Conversion was fastest in small and politically organized societies, but not impacted by social inequality.

Although important steps have been taken to prevent publication of a disproportionate number of non-reproducible chance findings, null findings are usually still considered disappointing. There is every reason to change this perception, because lack of associations can teach us just as much as significant ones.

Some acts of human cooperation are not easily explained by traditional models of kinship or reciprocity. Fitness interdependence may provide a unifying conceptual framework, in which cooperation arises from the mutual dependence for survival or reproduction, as occurs among mates, risk-pooling partnerships and brothers-in-arms.

Many species face the problems of how, when and with whom to cooperate. Comparing responses across species can reveal the evolutionary trajectory of these decisions, including in humans. Using nearly identical economic game methods to compare species could identify the evolutionary constraints and catalysts to cooperation.