4.7 Review

Evolving the Anthropocene: linking multi-level selection with long-term social-ecological change

Journal

SUSTAINABILITY SCIENCE
Volume 13, Issue 1, Pages 119-128

Publisher

SPRINGER JAPAN KK
DOI: 10.1007/s11625-017-0513-6

Keywords

Sociocultural niche construction (SNC); Agent-based modeling (ABM); Social-ecological systems (SES); The extended evolutionary synthesis (EES); Anthroecology; Archaeology

Funding

  1. US NSF Grants [CNS 1125210, DBI 1147089]
  2. National Socio- Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under National Science Foundation [DBI-1052875]
  3. European Research Council [323842]
  4. Div Of Biological Infrastructure
  5. Direct For Biological Sciences [1052875] Funding Source: National Science Foundation

Ask authors/readers for more resources

To what degree is cultural multi-level selection responsible for the rise of environmentally transformative human behaviors? And vice versa? From the clearing of vegetation using fire to the emergence of agriculture and beyond, human societies have increasingly sustained themselves through practices that enhance environmental productivity through ecosystem engineering. At the same time, human societies have increased in scale and complexity from mobile bands of hunter-gatherers to telecoupled world systems. We propose that these long-term changes are coupled through positive feedbacks among social and environmental changes, coevolved primarily through selection acting at the group level and above, and that this can be tested by combining archeological evidence with mechanistic experiments using an agent-based virtual laboratory (ABVL) approach. A more robust understanding of whether and how cultural multi-level selection couples human social change with environmental transformation may help in addressing the long-term sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene.

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