Raisa Hernández-Pachecoa*, Ulrich K.
Steinerb, Alexandra G. Rosatic,
Shripad Tuljapurkard
aCalifornia State University-Long Beach, Department of
Biological Sciences, 1250 N Bellflower Blvd, Long Beach, CA, USA
90840-0004
bFreie Universität Berlin, Biological Institute,
Königin-Luise Str. 1-3,14195 Berlin, Germany;
cDepartments of Psychology and Anthropology,
University of Michigan, 530 Church St, Ann Arbor, MI, USA 48109
d327 Campus Dr., Rm 233, Stanford University,
Stanford, CA, USA 94305
*Corresponding author:
rai.hernandezpacheco@csulb.edu
Competing interests statement : None.
Abstract . Several social traits including status, integration,
early-life adversity, and their interactions across the life course can
predict health, reproduction, and mortality in humans. Accordingly,
individual sociality plays a fundamental role in the emergence of
phenotypes driving the evolution of aging. Recent work placing human
social gradients on a biological continuum with other species provides a
useful evolutionary context for aging questions, but there is still a
need for a unified evolutionary framework for sociality, health, and
aging. Here, we first summarize current challenges to disentangle the
effects of the social environment on human life courses. Next, we review
recent advances in comparative biodemography and propose a
biodemographic perspective to address socially driven health phenotype
distributions and their evolutionary consequences using a nonhuman
primate population. This new comparative approach uses evolutionary
demography to address the joint dynamics of populations, sociality,
phenotypes, and life history parameters. The long-term goal is to
advance our understanding of the link between individual sociality,
population-level outcomes, and the evolution of aging.