Relationship Among Demographic, Social and Genetic Structure

本研究描述并检验了关于非人灵长类动物自然种群中个体行为、社会结构和遗传结构之间双向相互关系的假设。 PI及其同事对萨凡纳狒狒的研究种群Papio cynocephalus进行了二十多年的研究。 我们阐明了行为在提供生物体对可变条件的即时反应中的作用，并通过确定发育和基因表达发生的背景来塑造未来。 因此，行为在很大程度上决定了受选择的表型。 遗传分析将确定大多数行为和人口统计数据可用的个体之间的相关性。 这些将与PI最近开发的数据库相结合，允许分析相关形式的行为和人口数据。 待检验的假设涉及（1）几种类型的个体行为和成对行为之间的关系（交配，竞争，和亲和），（2）这些低层次的行为过程的关系，以群体水平的行为过程（支配等级，梳理网络）和人口统计过程（裂变和群体的人口结构），和（3）成对和群体水平的过程与社会群体内遗传结构的关系。 这些关系是灵长类动物社会生态学和行为进化模型的核心。

This research characterizes and tests hypotheses regarding the bidirectional inter-relationships among individual behavior, social structure, and genetic structure in a natural population of non-human primates. The study population of savannah baboons, Papio cynocephalus, has been under study by PI and colleagues for over two decades. We elucidate the role of behavior in providing the organism's immediate response to variable conditions, and in shaping the future through determining the context within which development and gene expression occur. Behavior thereby determines , to great extent, the phenotype that is subject to selection. Genetic analyses will identify relatedness among pairs of individuals for most of whom behavioral and demographic data are available. These will be integrated with PI's recently developed database, permitting analyses of related forms of behavioral and demographic data. Hypotheses to be tested address (1) the relationships among several types of individual and pairwise behaviors (mating, agonistic, and affiliative), (2) the relationships of these lower-level behavioral processes to group-level behavioral processes (dominance hierarchies, grooming networks), and demographic processes (fission and demographic structure of groups), and (3) the relationships of the pairwise and group-level processes to genetic structure within social groups. These relationships are at the core of models of primate socio-ecology and the evolution of behavior.