David Nolin, Ph.D.

Whaling, Sharing, and the Behavioral Ecology of Cooperation

Since 1997 I have spent nearly two years conducting field research in the traditional whaling and sea-hunting village of Lamalera, Indonesia, where I study how cooperative institutions are organized and how cooperatively acquired common-pool natural resources are managed and distributed. A combination of large-prey hunting and high-variance subsistence has made the village an ideal field site for studying cooperative subsistence behavior and human-environment interactions. I am especially interested in how cultural institutions and systems of norms can provide solutions to cooperative dilemmas and the problems posed by collective action. As a human behavioral ecologist, I am also interested in investigating the adaptive mechanisms that underpin human cooperative behavior.

This research relies heavily on social network statistics and modeling to test hypotheses about the organization of cooperative institutions and networks of social support. The results of this research show that several different adaptive mechanisms each explain part of the variation in cooperative behavior and that the underlying hypotheses are not mutually exclusive: kinship, reciprocity, and signaling all play a role in shaping patterns of cooperation and support. However, evolutionary mechanisms do not tell the whole story: social institutions, especially patrilineal kinship, corporate groups, and a complex system of norms governing harvest distributions all contribute to the maintenance of cooperation in this setting. Results from this work can be found in Current Anthropology, Human Nature, and Evolution and Human Behavior.

Evolutionary Demography of Marriage and Reproduction

My demographic research focuses on the ecological factors that influence the onset and timing of reproduction in humans. My recent collaborative work with John Ziker (Anthropology, Boise State) has focused on demographic modeling of the abrupt decline in fertility in his field site of Ust’-Avam in central Siberia following the fall of the USSR. Over a ten-year span the population total fertility rate (TFR) fell from five to one. We were able to show that this precipitous fall in fertility is likely due to a cessation of reproduction in the face of economic and ecological uncertainty following the collapse of the USSR. Results from this collaborative work have recently been published in Human Nature and Sustainability Science.

I use similar methods to investigate marriage delay in Lamalera. This community displays several peculiar demographic features for a subsistence fishing and whaling village, including a very late age of marriage (31 for men and 29 for women), a high rate of female celibacy, and a surprising number of children entering the clergy. This project uses historical demographic methods to analyze these trends in over a century’s worth of church parish records from Lamalera. Borrowing from life history and ecological constraints theory, I relate these demographic trends to the changing socioecology of the village and the effects of household composition and sibling competition on life history outcomes.

Origins and Persistence of Social Inequality in Small-Scale Societies

Since 2007 I have been involved in a Santa Fe Institute initiative studying the origins and persistence of inequality in small-scale societies. Through a series of SFI-hosted workshops, the initial project focused on the role intergenerational transmission of wealth plays in creating and maintaining wealth inequalities. This project pooled together data from 21 different societies (including Lamalera) to examine how wealth inequality was patterned cross-culturally with results published in Science and Current Anthropology. Our Shenk Lab project on marital assortment in small-scale societies, described above, is an extension of this earlier work.