Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: The Ecology and Evolution of Social Interdependence in Primates

该奖项是作为NSF社会、行为和经济学博士后研究奖学金(SPRF)计划的一部分提供的。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界、工业界或私营部门和政府的科学职业生涯培养有前途的、早期职业博士水平的科学家。SPRF奖项包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行两年的培训，并鼓励博士后研究员进行独立研究。国家科学基金会致力于促进科学界所有阶层的科学家参与其研究方案和活动，包括那些来自代表性不足的群体的科学家；博士后阶段被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的一个重要水平。每个博士后研究员都必须解决推动各自学科领域向前发展的重要科学问题。在Joan Silk博士和Jason Kamilar博士的赞助下，这项由亚利桑那州立大学主办的博士后研究奖学金，支持一位早期职业科学家研究密切相关的灵长类物种的社会群体在组成和结构上的不同方式和原因。虽然大多数灵长类群体保持凝聚力，但其他群体分裂成小型的、离散的社会群体，导致邻近家庭群体的拼凑，巧妙地反映了人类社区的形状。这种分裂过程可能是由生态困难、社会威胁或生态和社会挑战的某种组合引发的。然而，之前对这些可能性的测试缺乏必要的密集、详细的行为数据来量化物种之间的细微差异，而是依赖于粗略、简单化的社会类别。为了解决我们理解中的这些差距，这个项目将合并和整理来自几个数十年灵长类野外项目的数据。使用这一丰富的数据集，本研究将捕捉社会变异及其在社会群体和研究人群中的驱动因素。利用关系密切的灵长类动物作为人类社会进化的模型，这个项目将精确定位可能推动祖先人类群体在复杂的、超社会性社区出现之前很久就首先形成相互依存的家庭“集团”的力量。更广泛地说，由这项研究启用和生成的数据库将成为方法开发、教学机会和更广泛的科学用途的宝贵工具。该项目将量化社会网络结构，并确定其在狒狒和其他罂粟灵长类动物中的驱动因素--这一群体长期以来一直被宣传为人类进化的有用模型，并得到了深入研究。然而，这个分支并不是一个整体，居住在不同的环境中，由不同的社会结构组成。最值得注意的是，少数几个木瓜分类群独立进化为“多层次社会”，在这种社会中，小的社会群体被层级地嵌套在较大的超级群体中。然而，这种灵活的社会制度的所谓进化原因差异很大，可能在不同的谱系之间有所不同，还有待严格的测试。将大量纵向数据与前沿分析方法相结合，该项目将实现以下研究目标：(1)捕捉亲属关系、社会地位和共同的生殖兴趣在多大程度上影响研究人群内部和之间的二元关系；(2)跟踪群体层面的社会网络结构变化，以应对营养短缺和社会动荡；以及(3)开发系统发生学模型，将跨种群网络变化与关键的社会、生态和人口变量联系起来。通过结合这些互补的分析方法，该项目将很好地针对有关灵长类社会进化的长期问题，并确定社会结构变化的更广泛的基础。该项目还将为数十年的实地研究提供增值，统一以前仅被孤立分析的密集行为数据集，促进方法学进步，并建立必要的基础设施，以实现最初推动人类学中灵长类研究的比较目标。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award was provided as part of the NSF Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Drs. Joan Silk and Jason Kamilar, this postdoctoral research fellowship, hosted at Arizona State University, supports an early career scientist examining how and why the social groups of closely related primate species differ in their composition and structure. While most primate groups remain cohesive, others split into small, discrete social clusters, resulting in a patchwork of neighboring family groups that subtly mirrors the shape of human communities. This fracturing process could be triggered by ecological hardships, social threats, or some combination of ecological and social challenges. However, previous tests of these possibilities have lacked the dense, detailed behavioral data necessary to quantify subtle differences between species, instead relying on coarse, simplistic social categories. To address these gaps in our understanding, this project will combine and collate data from several multidecadal primate field projects. Using this rich dataset, the present study will then capture social variation and its drivers both within social groups and across study populations. Using closely related primates as models for human social evolution, this project will pinpoint forces that could have pushed ancestral human groups to first form interdependent family “cliques” long before the emergence of complex, ultrasocial communities. More broadly, the database enabled by and generated through this research will become an invaluable tool for methods development, teaching opportunities, and broader scientific use.This project will quantify social network structure and identify its drivers in baboons and other papionin primates — a group that has long been promoted as a useful model for human evolution and has been studied intensively. However, this clade is not a monolith, inhabiting varied environments and comprising disparate social structures. Most notably, a few papionin taxa independently evolved “multi-level societies,” in which small social groups are hierarchically nested within larger supergroups. However, the purported evolutionary causes of this flexible social system vary widely, may differ between lineages, and have yet to be rigorously tested. Combining a wealth of longitudinal data with cutting-edge analytical approaches, this project will achieve the following research aims: (1) capture the extent to which kinship, social status, and shared reproductive interests shape the strength of dyadic relationships within and across study populations; (2) track group-level changes in social network structure in response to both nutritional shortfalls and social upheavals; and (3) develop phylogenetically informed models linking cross-population network variation with key social, ecological, and demographic variables. By combining these complementary analytical approaches, the project is well poised to target long-standing questions regarding primate social evolution and identify the broader underpinnings of variation in social structure. The project will also provide value-added to decades of field research, uniting dense behavioral datasets that have previously only been analyzed in isolation, facilitating methodological advances, and building infrastructure necessary to achieve the comparative goals that initially motivated primate research within the anthropological sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.