3. A comparative biodemographic perspective of health and aging withing social contexts
To advance our understanding of the biodemography of aging within social contexts, we need a unifying method linking current research in the social determinants of individual variability to evolutionary demography approaches to the fundamental rules of life history evolution. Here, we provide a general roadmap for accomplishing this using rhesus macaques living at the Cayo Santiago Biological Field Station as an example. Although we do not provide empirical data, our model formulation is based on realistic demographic and health phenotype metrics currently being collected in this population. Our methods can be applied across the entire spectrum of animal models, yet nonhuman primates provide unique advantages to gain insights into aging due to their complex social behavior with analogs of human health-relevant status disparities (Phillips et al., 2014).