Abstract
Quality of Life (QoL) is a multi-dimensional concept that includes: a) the long-term sustainability of the earth; b) good health, education, welfare; and c) the psychological state of wellbeing. This article, which introduces a special issue on QoL from an evolutionary perspective, shows how modern evolutionary science provides a “toolkit” for studying all aspects of QoL.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. (2012). Why nations fail: The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty. New York: Crown.
Amato, R., Pinelli, M., Monticelli, A., Marino, D., Miele, G., & Cocozza, S. (2009). Genome-wide scan for signatures of human population differentiation and their relationship with natural selection, functional pathways and diseases. PLoS One, 4, e7927.
Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: Egalitarianism and the evolution of human altruism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Boehm, C. (2011). Moral origins: The evolution of virtue, altruism, and shame. New York: Basic Books.
Carroll, S. P., Hendry, A. P., Reznick, D. N., & Fox, C. W. (2007). Evolution on ecological time-scales. Functional Ecology. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2435.2007.01289.x.
Cochran, G., & Harpending, H. (2009). The 10,000 year explosion: How civilization accelerated human evolution. New York: Basic Books.
Delamónica, E. (2014). Transformational growth and poverty: An evolutionary approach for inter-country and inter-temporal comparisons of poverty incidence. Applied Research in Quality of Life. doi:10.1007/s11482-014-9364-9.
Dethlefsen, L., McFall-Ngai, M., & Relman, D. A. (2007). An ecological and evolutionary perspective on human-microbe mutualism and disease. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature06245.
Embry, D. D., Biglan, A., Galloway, D., McDaniels, R., Nunez, N., Dahl, M. J., et al. (2010). Reward and reminder visits to reduce tobacco sales to young people: A multiple-baseline across two states. Evolving the future: Toward a science of intentional change. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (under review), in press.
Friedl, J. (1981). Lactase deficiency: Distribution, associated problems, and implications for nutritional policy. Ecology of Food and Nutrition. doi:10.1080/03670244.1981.9990654.
Gowdy, J., Dollimore, D., Witt, U., & Wilson, D. S. (2013). Economic cosmology and the evolutionary challenge. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, in press.
Grinde, B. (2012a). Quality of life in an evolutionary perspective. Journal of Alternative Medicine Research, 44, 259–268.
Grinde, B. (2012b). Darwinian happiness (2nd ed.). Princeton NJ: Darwin Press.
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? The Behavioral and Brain Sciences. doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X.
Hicks, K., & Leonard, W. R. (2014). Developmental systems and inequality. Current Anthropology, 55(5), 523–550.
Holden, C., & Mace, M. (2009). Phylogenetic analysis of the evolution of lactose digestion in adults. Human Biology, 81, 597–619.
Jablonka, E., & Lamb, M. (2006). Evolution in four dimensions: Genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic variation in the history of life. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kerr, B., Neuhauser, C., Bohannan, B. J. M., & Dean, A. M. (2006). Local migration promotes competitive restraint in a host-pathogen ‘tragedy of the commons.’. Nature, 442, 75–78.
Kramer, M. S., Aboud, F., & Mironova, E. (2008). Breastfeeding and child cognitive development: New evidence from a large randomized trial. Archives of General Psychiatry, 65, 578–584.
Leonard, T. C. (2009). Origins of the myth of Social Darwinism: The ambiguous legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American thought. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 71, 37–51.
Lindeberg, S. (2010). Food and western disease: Health and nutrition from an evolutionary perspective. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.
Lloyd, L., Wilson, D. S., & Sober, E. (2014). Evolutionary mismatch and what to do about it: A basic tutorial. Evolution Institute White Paper.
Maynard Smith, J., & Szathmáry, E. (1995). The major transitions of evolution. New York: W.H. Freeman.
Mayr, E. (1961). Cause and effect in biology. Science, 134(3489), 1501–1506.
Moreno Mínguez, A., Martínez Fernández, L.C., & Carrasco-Campos, A. (2014). Family policy indicators and well-being in Europe from an evolutionary perspective. Applied Research in Quality of Life. doi:10.1007/s11482-014-9326-2.
Pagel, M. (2012). Wired for culture: The natural history of human cooperation. New York: Allen Lane.
Pagel, M., & Mace, R. (2004). The cultural wealth of nations. Nature, 428, 275–278.
Pepper, J., Findlay, S. C., Kassen, R., Spencer, S., & Maley, C. (2009). Cancer research meets evolutionary biology. Evolutionary Applications, 2, 62–70.
Pickett, K., & Wilkinson, J. B. (2009). The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger. London: Bloomsbury Press.
Prinz, R. J., Sanders, M. R., Shapiro, C. J., Whitaker, D. J., & Lutzker, J. R. (2009). Population-based prevention of child maltreatment: The U.S. Triple P Population Trial. Prevention Science, 10, 1–12.
Sapolsky, R. M. (2005). The influence of social hierarchy on primate health. Science. doi:10.1126/science.1106477.
Schlaepfer, M. A., Runge, M. C., & Sherman, P. W. (2002). Ecological and evolutionary traps. Trends in Ecology & Evolution. doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(02)02580-6.
Seeley, T. D. (2010). Honeybee democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sirgy, M. J., Michalos, A. C., Ferriss, A. L., Easterlin, R. A., Patrick, D., & Pavot, W. (2006). The quality-of-life (QOL) research movement: Past, present, and future. Social Indicators Research. doi:10.1007/s11205-005-2877-8.
Strachan, D. P. (2000). Family size, infection and atopy: The first decade of the ‘hygiene hypothesis.’. Thorax. doi:10.1136/thorax.55.suppl.
Timmers, M. A., Bird, C. E., Skillings, D. J., Smouse, P. E., & Toonen, R. J. (2012). There’s no place like home: Crown-of-thorns outbreaks in the central pacific are regionally derived and independent events. PloS one. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031159.
Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 20, 410–433.
Turchin, P. (2005). War and peace and war. Upper Saddle River: Pi Press.
Weaver, R. (2014). Evolutionary theory and neighborhood quality: A multilevel selection-inspired approach to studying urban property conditions. Applied research in quality of life. doi:10.1007/s11482-014-9328-0.
Wilson, D. S. (2011). The neighborhood project: Using evolution to improve my city, one block at a time. New York: Little, Brown.
Wilson, D. S. (2015). Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Wilson, D S, Hayes, S. C., Biglan, A., & Embry, D. (2014). Evolving the future: Toward a science of intentional change. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37, 395–460.
Wilson, D.S. and Hessen, D.O. (2014). Blueprint for the Global Village. This View of Life, May 5 2014. http://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/blueprint-for-the-global-village.
Wilson, D. S., & Gowdy, J. M. (2013). Evolution as a general theoretical framework for economics and public policy. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 90 (null), S3–S10. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.008.
Acknowledgments
I thank Jerry Lieberman for helping to co-found the Evolution Institute and taking the lead role in organizing the projects on Quality of Life and Norway. I also thank Gin Kohl Lieberman and Joseph Sirgy for their essential contributions to the projects and the special issue.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wilson, D.S. Quality of Life from an Evolutionary Perspective. Applied Research Quality Life 11, 331–342 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-014-9341-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-014-9341-3