The Comparative Approach in Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology

By Charles L. Nunn. 2011

323 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Comparison is fundamental to evolutionary anthropology. When scientists study chimpanzee cognition, for example, they compare chimp performance on cognitive tasks to the performance of human children on the same tasks. And when new fossils are found, such as those of the tiny humans of Flores, scientists compare these remains to other fossils and contemporary humans. Comparison provides a way to draw general inferences about the evolution of traits and has long been the cornerstone of efforts to understand biological and cultural diversity. Individual studies of fossilized remains, living species, or human populations are the essential units of analysis in a comparative study; bringing these elements into a broader comparative framework creates a means of testing adaptive hypotheses and generating new ones. With this book, Charles L. Nunn intends to ensure that evolutionary anthropologists and organismal biologists have the tools to realize the potential of comparative research. Nunn provides a wide-ranging investigation of the comparative foundations of evolutionary anthropology in past and present research, including studies of animal behavior, biodiversity, linguistic evolution, allometry, and cross-cultural variation. He also points the way to the future, exploring the new phylogeny-based comparative approaches and offering a how-to manual for scientists who wish to incorporate these new methods into their research.

Subfields: Cultural Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18f162d3f66ebd1f03ac6dd0c4c1f11abfbdd808

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Citations in the corpus

phytools 2.0: an updated R ecosystem for phylogenetic comparative methods (and other things) (2023, background): “…indicated by the tree) about the evolutionary process or past, the contemporary ecology, the biogeographic history, or the origins via diversification, of the particular taxa of our phylogeny (Harvey and Pagel 1991; Felsenstein 2004; Nunn 2011; OMeara 2012; Harmon 2019; Revell and Harmon 2022).”
Innovative Approaches to the Relationship Between Diet and Mandibular Morphology in Primates (2012, methodology): ““Hard object feeding” is also associated with deeper mandibular corpora in mangabeys (Bouvier 1986a; Daegling and McGraw 2000; Hylander 1979a), with relatively deeper corpora, and greater condylar and symphyseal dimensions in pitheciines (Bouvier 1986b), and with greater strength and stiffness of…”
Flower colour and phylogeny along an altitudinal gradient in the Himalayas of Nepal (2014, methodology): “Significance of k was tested against null hypotheses of k = 0 and k = 1 using procedures outlined in Nunn (2009).”
Statistical Issues and Assumptions of Phylogenetic Generalized Least Squares (2014, background): “These ‘phylogenetic’ assumptions have been treated in quite some detail elsewhere (see above and also Harvey and Pagel 1991 or Nunn 2011, and for possible approaches to deal with uncertainty in the phylogeny or the model of evolution, see, e.g., Chap.”
Are badges of status adaptive in large complex primate groups (2015, methodology): “The parameter lambda was estimated jointly within the regression context using a maximum likelihood procedure (Nunn, 2011).”