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19.5: Key Terms

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    76107
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    Altruism: Providing a benefit to someone else at a cost to oneself, without expecting future reciprocation.

    Biological determinism: Behaviors are determined exclusively by genes.

    Ecology: The physical and social environment, including food resources, predators, terrain, weather, social rules, behavior of other people, and cultural rules.

    Evolutionary history: An understanding of how traits (including behaviors) may be the result of natural selection in our hominin past.

    Human Behavioral Ecology: The field of anthropology that explores how ecological factors and evolutionary history combine to influence how humans behave.

    Kin selection: A type of natural selection whereby people help relatives, which can evolve because people are helping other individuals with whom they share genes.

    Naturalistic fallacy: The incorrect belief that what occurs is what ought to be.

    Proximate explanation: The mechanism that is immediately responsible for an event.

    Reciprocal altruism: Helping behavior that occurs because individuals expect that any help they provide will be reciprocated in the future.

    Show-off hypothesis: Individuals provide benefits to others because it improves their reputation and social status.

    Ultimate explanation: An explanation for an event that is further removed than a proximate explanation but that provides a greater insight or understanding. In human behavioral ecology, ultimate explanations usually describe how a behavior is linked to reproduction and survival.


    This page titled 19.5: Key Terms is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Beth Shook, Katie Nelson, Kelsie Aguilera, and Lara Braff, Eds. (Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.