Laura Fortunato

I am a PhD student in Biological Anthropology at the Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity [1] and the Human Evolutionary Ecology Group [2] at UCL [3]. My background lies within integrative biology and evolutionary anthropology. My research focuses on understanding patterns of variation in human cultural behaviour through the analysis of variation in cultural practices.

In particular, I am looking at variation in marriage practices in Indo-European societies: why do some groups settle for monogamy, while most human societies practice polygyny? What factors determine patterns of wealth transfers at marriage? The models developed to understand behavioural variation in non-human species provide the basis for understanding behaviour and decision-making at the individual level; I am interested in modelling how the patterns emerging at the level of societies from individual behaviours feed back to influence those behaviours.

My answers to the 5 questions:

1. What topics do you have some expertise in and would you be willing to help others learn them?

• Evolutionary approaches to human (cultural) behaviour, in particular human behavioural ecology.
• Application of phylogenetic methods to the study of cross-cultural variation.

2. What do you want to learn at the CSSS?

I would like to learn modelling skills to link behaviour at the individual level (e.g. individual decision-making) with group-level behaviour codified as social norms and cultural practices. I would also like to learn how to assess the validity of the models in view of the available data on human cross-cultural variation.

3. Do you have any projects or research interests that would benefit from an interdisciplinary approach?

• Modelling the conditions required at the level of both individuals and populations for the evolution of human socially imposed monogamy (SIM), i.e. a system of monogamous marriage socially enforced through legal sanctions. SIM represents a puzzle because of its rarity (polygyny is allowed in over 80% of human societies) and uneven distribution (SIM is not found in Africa and New Guinea). As yet, it is not clear whether the processes leading to the evolution of social and/or sexual monogamy in other species also operate in the evolution of human SIM.

• Modelling the transmission of cultural traits between populations. Cultural traits can be acquired via inheritance from the parent generation (vertical transmission) or via diffusion from neighbouring populations (horizontal transmission). Whether different sets of traits, e.g. marriage and kinship customs, economic systems, religious beliefs etc, require different explanatory models represents a central issue in understanding the evolution of human cultural diversity.

4. Do you have any ideas for what sort of project you would like to do this summer?

The projects in 3. above or anything to do with modelling behaviour.

5. Suppose you could travel one-hundred years in the future and ask researchers any three questions. What would those questions be?

• Where we are in understanding the origin of life on Earth.
• Where we are in understanding how humans came to be the weird animal they are.
• To what extent scientific knowledge has informed public policy, if at all...