Advancing methods for the biodemography of aging within social contexts

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.