Understanding Age and Society using Natural Populations

全球几乎所有人类社会面临的一个主要问题是人口的迅速老龄化。例如，仅在过去的40年里，英国的平均年龄就从34岁增加到40岁以上，在未来的30年里，预计65岁以上的人数将比现在增加一倍，达到2000万人。由于年龄影响到生活的几乎所有方面，包括行为、健康和生殖，预计年龄构成的这些变化将对社会产生巨大影响。但是，由于这是人类历史上第一次以这种方式经历“老龄化”，因此对这些变化进行预测非常困难。有趣的是，现在我们知道，衰老不仅发生在人类身上，也发生在整个动物王国。广泛的研究已经在从昆虫到鲸鱼的数百种物种中发现了衰老的证据。事实上，自然动物种群已经被广泛接受，因为它对理解个体如何衰老以及个体随着年龄增长而变化的机制特别有用。在本提案中，我证明了自然种群也具有巨大的，但以前未被认识到的，理解社会如何老龄化的潜力，特别是由于以下三个互补的原因：首先，与人类种群（以前从未“老龄化”）不同，许多动物社会在监测期间显示出其人口年龄构成的巨大变化。因此，这将使我能够根据以前的人口老龄化模式（而不是完全依赖对未来的预测）来发展对老龄化社会的理解。其次，动物追踪技术的最新进展已经带来了数百项研究，这些研究对野生动物的社会网络进行了非常详细的量化，这些研究通常涉及个体的整个一生和几代人。我认为，这种精细尺度的数据集将允许我们研究个人的社会行为如何随着年龄的增长而变化的基本过程，以及这种变化如何随着时间的推移而构成社会。最后，实验往往是在所有领域分离“因果关系”的关键，这在围绕社会性的研究中尤其重要（因为一个人的行为会自动影响与之互动的人的行为）。我以前的研究开发了一种新的方法来实验操纵野鸟的社会系统。我将使用这种独特的方法来确定个人年龄如何直接影响社会结构和社会过程（如新信息的发展和传播以及合作行为）。因此，通过收集和分析不同物种和种群的社会网络随着时间的推移和不同年龄的构成，以及在模型研究系统中进行社会实验，我将充分利用自然种群提供的未被认识到的机会，在年龄和社会之间的相互作用方面获得新的见解。这项研究将对年龄如何塑造个人的社会行为和新兴的社会结构、影响这种影响的生态和进化力量以及年龄对信息传递和合作的基本社会过程的影响提供新的理解。

A major issue facing almost all human societies around the globe is rapid ageing of the population. For example, over the past 40years alone, the average age in the UK has increased from 34 to over-40, and, in the next 30 years, the amount of over-65 year olds is predicted to double from today's number and reach ~20million individuals. As age affects almost all aspects of life, including behaviour, health, and reproduction, these changes in age composition are expected to have enormous consequences for society. But, as this is the first time in history that human populations have ever experienced 'ageing' in this way, it is exceptionally difficult to make predictions regarding these changes. Interestingly, ageing is now known to not only occur in humans, but also across the animal kingdom. A broad range of studies have found evidence of ageing in hundreds of species, ranging from insects to whales. In fact, natural animal populations have become widely accepted as particularly useful for understanding how individuals age, and the mechanisms that underpin how individuals change as they grow older. In this proposal, I demonstrate that natural populations also have great, but previously unrecognized, potential for understanding how societies age, particularly due to the following three complementary reasons: Firstly, unlike the human population (which has never 'aged' before), many animal societies have shown large variation in their population age compositions whilst being monitored. Therefore, this will allow me to develop an understanding of ageing societies based on previous patterns of ageing within the population (instead of relying entirely on predictions into the future). Secondly, recent advances in animal tracking technologies have given rise to hundreds of studies that quantify wild animal social networks in great detail, often over individuals' entire lifetimes and across multiple generations. I propose that such fine-scale datasets will allow the examination of fundamental processes governing how individuals' social behaviour changes as they age, and how this structures societies over time. Finally, experiments are often key to separating 'correlation from causation' across all fields, and this is particularly important in research surrounding sociality (as the behaviour of one individual automatically affects the behaviour of those it interacts with). My previous research has developed a novel method for experimentally manipulating a wild bird social system. I will use this unique approach to determine how individual age directly effects society structure and social processes (such as the development and spread of new information and cooperative behaviour). Therefore, through amassing and analyzing various species' and populations' social networks over time and across various age compositions, along with carrying out social experiments within a model study system, I will take full advantage of the unrecognized opportunities that natural populations offer in terms of gaining novel insights into the interplay between age and society. This research will provide a new understanding of how age shapes individuals' social behaviour and emerging society structure, the ecological and evolutionary forces affecting this effect, and the consequences of age for the fundamental social processes of information transmission and cooperation.