Review Questions for Midterm I:

The Human Life Course, Anthro 160, Spring 2000 (Gurven)

1. What is the difference between a scientific approach and a moral approach to human behavior? What are some of the basic goals of a scientific approach? What is the difference between description and explanation?

2. Why do we use the comparative method in human evolutionary ecology? What kinds of comparisons do we use?

3. What is the logic underlying the theory of natural selection? What are the basic components of fitness?

4. Why do we believe that organisms are designed to do things?

4b. What are Tinbergen’s 4 levels of biological explanation?

5. What are the three main types of selection? Give examples of each? Why is no trait adaptive in all environments?

6. What is the difference between genotype and phenotype? What roles does the environment play in ontogeny and natural selection?

7. What do evolutionary psychologists believe that natural selection produces a set of special purpose mechanism designed to perform specific psychological functions? What is the Swiss Army knife analogy to human psychology?

8. What are some specific examples of special purpose psychological mechanisms? What can we learn about human psychology from people with problems such as William’s Syndrome? Give an example of a developmental sequence that demonstrates the emergence of social skills? What is motherese? What is evidence that babies respond differently to motherese than to normal adult discourse? Why should that be the case?

9. What is the problem with the idea of group selection? Why do modern biologists think that selection on individuals is responsible for the traits that organisms possess? What kinds of traits do we expect organisms to have?

10. What is inclusive fitness? What are the three components of Hamilton’s equation? Can you calculate the degree of relatedness between first cousins whose parents were full sibs?

12. What is the most common form of adoption/fosterage in human societies? In the Albuquerque men study, what did we find is the most common relationship between a man and a child he parents who is not his biological offspring? What is the next most common relationship? What do the fact that adoption of strangers is rare, but does occur, tell us about human psychology and its evolution?

13. What is the prisoner’s dilemma? How does it relate to the theory of reciprocal altruism? How is a ‘one shot’ prisoner’s dilemma different from a repeated prisoner’s dilemma?

14. What was the hypothesis underlying the causes of food sharing among the Ache? How was this hypothesis tested?

15. What is heritability? Why might the heritability of height be high in some populations (e.g., the modern US) and low in others (e.g., in the developing world or in the US during the past)?

16. What is the principle of allocation? How does it relate to the concept of tradeoffs? What are diminishing returns? How do diminishing returns relate to the principle of allocation?

17. What are three distinctive features of the human life course? According to Kaplan’s theory, how does the type of foods that human hunter-gatherers eat affect the costs and benefits of development and the length of the lifespan? Compare human hunter-gatherers with chimpanzees.

20) Do we expect all behavior to be adaptive in a biological sense? With respect to people in modern industrial societies, give some examples of both adaptive and nonadaptive behavior.

Some example exam questions:

Multiple Choice (3 points)

1. According to Daly and Wilson:

a. after controlling for the opportunity to kill, homicide is most likely to occur among close kin

b. the most common form of homicide is killing strangers

c. revenge killing is a form of spite with no evolutionary explanation

d. none of the above

2. Disruptive selection is:

a. a form of selection that follows radical environmental change

b. a kind of selection that favors extremes and disfavors the central part of the distribution

c. a form of selection that changes the distribution of traits in organisms

d. both b and c

3. According to biologists,

a. males have large gametes and females have small gametes

b. females have large gametes and males have small gametes

c. the definition of the sexes is different for each species

d. none of the above

4. The prisoner’s dilemma favors altruism when:

a. the same actors face the same dilemma repeatedly

b. prisoners have one chance to lower their sentences by cooperating

c. one prisoner can cheat and the other one can’t

d. none of the above

Short answers - Please answer each question with two to four sentences

1. What is kin selection. What are b, c and r in the equation b*r>c.

2. What is the principle of allocation? How does it relate to the concept of diminishing returns?

Essay Question Please be concise but make sure you have an answer to each part. Choose only one essay (30 points)

1. What is the problem with the idea of group selection? Why do modern biologists think that selection on individuals is responsible for the traits that organisms possess? What are two causes for the evolution of altruism that do not involve group selection? Give examples.