Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

Structure and Dynamics

Structure and Dynamics bannerUC Irvine

About

The Structure and Dynamics eJournal welcomes articles, book reviews, data, simulations, research material, and special issues that examine aspects of human evolution, social structure and behavior, culture, cognition, or related topics. Our goal is to advance the historic mission of anthropology in the broadest sense to describe and explain the range of variation in human biology, society, culture and civilization across time and space. Submissions of databases, software tutorials, programs, and teaching materials are welcomed, as are communications on research materials of interest to a wide variety of science and social science researchers, including networks, dynamical models, and complexity research and related genre.

Articles

What Anthropologists Should Know About the New Evolutionary Synthesis

Discoveries of modern biology are forcing a re-evaluation of even the central pillars of neo-Darwinian evolution. Anthropologists study the processes and results of biological and biocultural evolution, so they must be aware of the scope and nature of these changes in biology. We introduce these changes, comment briefly on how will influence anthropology, and suggest numerous readings to introduce anthropologists to the significance and substance of the new evolutionary synthesis.

  • 1 supplemental file

Updated scripts for R in Eff and Dow (2009) Issue 3#1 art 1

Changes in R necessitate updated R scripts for Eff, E. Anthon, & Dow, Malcolm M. (2009). How to Deal with Missing Data and Galton’s Problem in Cross-Cultural Survey Research: A Primer for R. Structure and Dynamics, 3(3). Retrieved from: http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/7cm1f10b

  • 1 supplemental ZIP

Farming and Fighting: An Empirical Analysis of the Ecological-Evolutionary Theory of the Incidence of Warfare

Explanations of the causes of war fall roughly into two schools: those arguing for the primacy of environment and technology, and those arguing for the primacy of sociopolitical factors. We re-examine two hypotheses from the former school, viz, societies are more likely to engage in war when they have: 1) more productive subsistence technology; and 2) higher population density. Using data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, and up-to-date multivariate modeling methods, we find only qualified support for the first hypothesis and find the reverse relationship for the second: higher population densities lead to less war, not more. We show that omitted variable bias can explain the failure of previous studies to discover this relationship. Finally, we show that the two schools seem to be equally correct, in that each explains about the same proportion of the variation in frequency of external war.

  • 1 supplemental ZIP

Farming and Fighting: An Empirical Analysis of the Ecological-Evolutionary Theory of the Incidence of Warfare

Explanations of the causes of war fall roughly into two schools: those arguing for the primacy of environment and technology, and those arguing for the primacy of sociopolitical factors. We re-examine two hypotheses from the former school, viz, societies are more likely to engage in war when they have: 1) more productive subsistence technology; and 2) higher population density. Using data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, and up-to-date multivariate modeling methods, we find only qualified support for the first hypothesis and find the reverse relationship for the second: higher population densities lead to less war, not more. We show that omitted variable bias can explain the failure of previous studies to discover this relationship. Finally, we show that the two schools seem to be equally correct, in that each explains about the same proportion of the variation in frequency of external war.

 

  • 1 supplemental ZIP