Why Human Behavioral Ecology Needs Behavioral Genetics: The Problem of Phenotypic Gambit

Međedović, Janko (2024) Why Human Behavioral Ecology Needs Behavioral Genetics: The Problem of Phenotypic Gambit. Evolutionary Behavioral Science, 18 (2). pp. 158-173. ISSN 2330-2925

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Abstract

The phenotypic gambit is one of the crucial assumptions in evolutionary behavioral ecology: it asserts that a phenotypic variation of a trait represents a reasonably adequate estimation of its genetic variation. This is particularly important since one of the main goals of behavioral ecology is to analyze the patterns of natural selection on phenotypic traits—the phenotypic gambit allows only the measurement of phenotypic variance of a trait, without exploring its genetic variance. The phenotypic gambit is crucially dependent on heritability itself—if there are systematic factors that decrease heritability, there is elevated chance for phenotypic gambit to fail. We argue that there is at least one ecological condition, harsh environment, which is related to markedly lower heritability of life history and behavioral traits in humans. Hence, the measurement of phenotypic variance of a trait may generate invalid results, at least for participantswho originated from harsh environmental conditions. As a solution we propose the integration of behavioral ecological and behavioral genetic research designs: this integrative design allows researchers to partition the genetic and environmental variances of an examined trait and to obtain genetic correlations between the trait and fitness proxies. Furthermore, it enables that ecological conditions can be analyzed as a moderator in this link. Due to the strengths of integrated design, we believe that this research approach may be highly fruitful for the future studies in evolutionary human sciences.

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