Sociobiology

In response to the population aging, on May 31, 2021, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) proposed the policy that a couple can have three children and rolled out more supportive measures to further optimize fertility policies, which is another major initiative following the universal two-child policy introduced in November 2015. Currently, a series of population policy innovations have aroused great attractions among the public and triggered a hot debating on the Internet...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Loneliness is linked to declining physical health across cardiovascular, inflammatory, metabolic, and cognitive domains. As a result, loneliness is increasingly being recognized as a public health threat, though the mechanisms that have been studied do not yet explain all loneliness-related health risk. Potential mechanisms include loneliness having 1.) direct, causal impacts on health, possibly maintained by epigenetic modification, 2.) indirect effects mediated through health-limiting behaviors, and 3.) artifactual associations perhaps related to genetic overlap and reverse causation...

Many groups of animals have evolved social behaviours in different forms, from intimate familial associations to the complex eusocial colonies of some insects. The subfamily Xylocopinae, including carpenter bees and their relatives, is a diverse clade exhibiting a wide range of social behaviours, from solitary to obligate eusociality with distinct morphological castes, making them ideal focal taxa in studying the evolution of sociality. We used ultraconserved element data to generate a broadly sampled phylogeny of the Xylocopinae, including several newly sequenced species...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Unintended pregnancy poses significant health risks for mothers, often leading to induced abortions. Understanding fertility is crucial when it comes to predicting the likelihood of unintended pregnancy. This study employed a quantitative research approach, utilizing a survey method. The survey was conducted in 2022 and involved 1065 married women aged 15-49 residing in Shiraz. The data collection process involved the administration of a standardized questionnaire. The sampling process utilized a combination of multi-stage classification and systematic random methods...

This article describes survivorship and explores factors affecting mortality risks in a captive colony of coppery titi monkeys (Plecturocebus cupreus) housed at the California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC), at UC Davis, in Davis, CA. We analyzed data collected on individuals since the colony's creation in the 1960s, with a sample of 600 animals with partially complete information (date of birth, age at death, body mass, parental lineage). We used three methods: (1) Kaplan-Meier regressions followed by a log-rank test to compare survival in male and female titi monkeys, (2) a breakpoint analysis to identify shifts in the survival curves, and (3) Cox regressions to test the effect of body mass change, parental pair tenure, and parental age on mortality risk...

The resilience of a healthcare system hinges on the adaptability of its teams. Thus far, healthcare teams have relied on well-defined scopes of practice to fulfill their safety mandate. While this feature has proven effective when dealing with stable situations, when it comes to disruptive events, healthcare teams find themselves navigating a fine balance between safety and resilience. Therefore, a better understanding of how the safety vs resilience trade-off varies under different circumstances is necessary if we are to promote and better train for resilience in modern healthcare teams...

When the sociobiology debate erupted in 1975, there were almost too many contributions to the heated exchanges between sociobiologists and their critics to count. In the fall of 1976, a Canadian educational film entitled Sociobiology: Doing What Comes Naturally sparked further controversy due to its graphic visuals and outrageous narration. While critics claimed the film was a promotional tool to further the sociobiological agenda in educational settings, sociobiologists quickly distanced themselves from the film and, in turn, accused the critics of consciously misrepresenting sociobiology by organizing showings of the film...

Coordination in timing of reproduction is driven by multiple ecological and sociobiological processes for a wide array of species. Eastern wild turkeys ( Meleagris gallopavo silvestris ) use a male dominance polygynous mating system, where males communicate with females via elaborate courtship displays and vocalizations at display sites. Most females prefer to mate with dominant males; therefore, asynchronous breeding and nesting may occur which can disproportionately influence individual fitness within breeding groups...

The COVID-19 pandemic and its social, economic, and health implications have generally reduced women's fertility intentions in different countries. In this article, we aimed to review studies of the impact of COVID-19 infection on women's fertility intentions and interventions to provide a theoretical basis and practical benchmark for the development of effective intervention strategies in China, which lifted its zero COVID system in early December 2022.

This paper tries to summarize the results of studies from different disciplines supporting the idea that temperamental traits, such as "reckless/hyper-exploratory" attitudes, commonly believed to be associated with psychopathology, surprisingly turn out as adaptive under specific stress conditions. In particular, this paper analyzes an ethologic line of research on primates suggesting models for a sociobiological interpretation of mood disorders in humans; a study that found high frequencies of a genetic variance associated with bipolar disorder in people without bipolar disorder but with hyperactivity/novelty-seeking traits; the outcomes of socio-anthropologicalhistorical surveys on the evolution of mood disorders in Western countries in the last centuries; surveys on changing societies in Africa and African migrants in Sardinia; and studies that found higher frequencies of mania and subthreshold mania among Sardinian immigrants in Latin American megacities...

In contemporary societies, social status - especially income - is one of the most important determinants of ever marrying among men. Using U.S. census data, we estimated the importance of income for ever marrying among men and women, analyzing birth cohorts from 1890 to 1973. We examined individuals between the ages of 45 and 55, a total of 3.5 million men and 3.6 million women. We find that for men, the importance of income in predicting ever being married increased steadily over time. Income predicted only 2...

ABSTRACT: Primates understand the meaning of their own and other species' alarm calls, but little is known about how they acquire such knowledge. Here, we combined direct behavioural observations with playback experiments to investigate two key processes underlying vocal development: comprehension and usage. Especifically, we studied the development of con- and heterospecific alarm call recognition in free-ranging sooty mangabeys, Cercocebus atys , across three age groups: young juveniles (1-2y), old juveniles (3-4y) and adults (> 5y)...

The article presents the results of a study of chromosomal mutations in residents living in the Aral Sea disaster zone. The present study was designed to evaluate the impact of the combined effect of a chemical mutagen (nickel) and bacterial microflora on the level of chromosomal aberrations (CA) in peripheral blood lymphocytes. This study used classical methods of cell cultivation, methods for determining chromosomal aberrations, a cytomorphological method for assessing epithelial cells, and an atomic absorption method for determining trace elements in the blood...

ABSTRACT: Abiotic factors are limitations that can affect animal activity and distribution, whether directly or indirectly. The objective of this study was to evaluate how abiotic factors influence the activity of two mustelid species inhabiting the same region but different habitats in NE Poland-pine marten inhabits forests and stone marten occupy built-up areas. From 1991 to 2016, we obtained 23,639 year-round observations of 15 pine martens and 8524 observations of 47 stone martens...

The role of camp physicians of the Waffen-SS ("Armed SS," military branch of the Nazi Party's Schutzstaffel ) in the implementation of the Holocaust has been the subject of limited research, even though they occupied a key position in the extermination process. From 1943 and 1944 onward, SS camp physicians made the individual medical decisions on whether each prisoner was fit for work or was immediately subjected to extermination, not only at the Auschwitz labor and extermination camp but also in pure labor camps like Buchenwald and Dachau...

Gossip and bullying have psychosocial concerns and are usually considered as vice, bad, hence, non-virtuous. This paper deals with a plausible modest account for them to be considered not as bad, rather significant behavioral and epistemic tools from evolutionary and epistemological points of view. It adheres to a relationship between gossip and bullying in real (sociobiological-psychological domains) and within cyberspaces. Considering the formation of social relations and orders in reality and virtual platforms, it attempts to understand the issues and advantages gossip poses to societies from a reputational perspective...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Our research fills a critical gap in the depression literature by utilizing a life course perspective to examine gender-gene interactions in association with depression trajectories over time. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we estimated multi-level negative binomial and logistic mixed models to analyze gender-specific trajectories of depressive symptoms (CESD-8) and potential clinical depression risk from middle to late adulthood in relation to gender-by-polygenic-risk (PRS) interactions. We found increasingly greater female-male gaps in the CESD-8 scale and a higher probability of clinical depression risk with increasing polygenic risk scores...