R Mace

Biographic Data

ID18265
NAMER Mace
GIVEN NAMESR
FAMILY NAMEMace
SIGNATUREMACE R
AFFILIATIONSUniversity College London
ORCID0000-0002-6137-7739
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS70
TOTAL CITATIONS408
AUTHOR COUNT72
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1993
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX11

  • Kin Selection Underpins Family Dynamics in Rural China

    Open AccessQiao-Qiao He, Mingyang Wang et al.ARTICLEHuman Nature2026References: 49

  • Gender differences in social networks under subsistence changes

    Open AccessYaming Huang, Gabriel Šaffa et al.ARTICLEEvolution and Human Behavior2026References: 68

    Sexual selection theory suggests that gendered social strategies are universal outcomes of reproductive competition, yet recent cross-cultural studies show that these strategies are shaped by socio-ecological factors although they remain insufficiently examined. In particular, little is known about how gendered strategies adapt during periods of rapid social and economic changes. To this end, we examine gender differences in scale and composition…

  • Human behavioural ecology is cultural ecology

    Open AccessR MaceARTICLEEvolution and Human Behavior2025References: 2

  • A season for indulgence

    Open AccessR MaceARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2025

    An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button

  • Having a monk in the family and all-cause mortality

    Open AccessLiqiong Zhou, Yuan Chen et al.ARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2025References: 5

    Religious celibate monks at the household level possibly reduce all-cause mortality risk among non-monk older Tibetans. This study aims to investigate the association between having a celibate monk in a family and the all-cause mortality of non-monk household members in a Tibetan population. Baseline interviews were conducted for 713 agropastoral Amdo Tibetans aged ≥50 years residing in the eastern Tibetan Plateau from 2016 to 2017. The Cox mixed…

  • Skewed sex ratios and violence against women in Pakistan

    Open AccessOlympia L K Campbell, Maheen Pracha et al.ARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2025References: 5

    Concerns have been raised that an excess of men leads to societal violence, including violence against women, although recent evidence has challenged this view. One area that remains untested is honour killings, a type of femicide perpetrated by unrelated family members, such as intimate partners, and related family members, such as parents and siblings. Using a novel data set of media reports of honour killings from Pakistan we test whether the …

  • Discrepancies in Self-reporting of Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan

    Open AccessNarhulan Halimbekh, Olympia L K Campbell et al.ARTICLEHuman Nature2025References: 45

    Bride kidnapping, where Women are abducted for marriage, persists in Kyrgyzstan despite being illegal. Although it is estimated that up to one-third of marriages in Kyrgyzstan result from abduction, the true prevalence of this practice is unknown. Estimates are based on self-reporting of a practice that has become illegal. Here we examine whether there are sex and intergenerational differences in this reporting, that reflect a changing legal and …

  • Genetic markers of cousin marriage and honour cultures

    Open AccessOlympia L K Campbell, Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias et al.ARTICLEEvolution and Human Behavior2024

    Honour cultures, characterized by violent responses to perceived threats to personal or family honour, are widespread. Honour killings, one of the manifestations of honour cultures, claims the lives of thousands of women each year, often at the hands of close relatives, representing not only a social problem but also an evolutionary puzzle. They typically follow accusations of sexual impropriety and are the most extreme manifestation of a range o…

  • The cultural evolution of witchcraft beliefs

    Open AccessSarah Peacey, Baihui Wu et al.ARTICLEEvolution and Human Behavior2024

  • Sibling competition and dispersal drive sex differences in religious celibacy

    Open AccessAlberto J C Micheletti, R MaceARTICLEEvolution and Human Behavior2024

    Religious practices vary greatly worldwide. Lifelong celibacy is present in many world religions, but it remains unclear why the frequency of monks and nuns (male and female celibates) varies at different times and places. Here, we develop a two-sex inclusive fitness model of lifelong celibacy. We find that the sex that competes more over parental resources is favoured to have more celibates, that is more monks than nuns are expected when brother…

  • The world has gone mad

    Open AccessR MaceARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2024References: 2

    Horror and grief has been streamed into our TVs and phones for many weeks now.So total is the coverage of Gaza it has crowded out most other news, despite much else in need of coverage happening around the world.One might be tempted to thinkit is not in my country and I cannot influence anything, so I can ignore it.However, emotions are powerful things, evolved for good reason; so nearly everyone finds themselves affected at some level by seeing …

  • Alcohol consumption, life history and extinction risk among Raute hunter–gatherers from Nepal

    Open AccessInez Derkx, G Le Menn et al.ARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2024References: 4

    Hunter–gatherer populations underwent a mass extinction in the Neolithic, and in present times face challenges such as explicit sedentarisation policies. An exception is in Nepal, where the nomadic Raute people receive monthly governmental individual payments. One consequence of the money transfers has been a significant increase in alcohol consumption, with nearly all individuals drinking industrially produced alcohol. Here we investigate the Ra…

  • Religiosity and gender bias structure social networks

    Open AccessErhao Ge, Cairang Dongzhi et al.ARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2024Cited by: 3References: 15

    The number of studies examining gender differences in the social relationship rewards associated with costly religious practice has been surprisingly low. Here, we use data from 289 residents of an agricultural Tibetan village to assess whether individuals are more inclined to establish supportive relationships with religious individuals in general and to investigate the gender disparities in the relationship between religiosity and personal netw…

  • Sex differences in costly signaling in rural Western China

    Open AccessCairang Dongzhi, CaiRangDongZhi CaiRangDongZhi et al.ARTICLEEvolution and Human Behavior2023

    Costly rituals convey commitment to communities and advertise trustworthiness and cooperativeness to peers, which might explain why humans perform costly religious rituals. Here, we compare the efficacy of occasional public displays versus regular but less public acts for prestige enhancement. We collected data on religious behaviors ranging from daily low-cost practices to infrequent high-cost pilgrimages to distant locations among residents of …

  • Development of teaching in ni-Vanuatu children

    Open AccessE Brandl, Emily H Emmott et al.ARTICLEChild Development2023

    Teaching is an important mechanism of social learning. In industrialized societies, 3-year-olds tend to teach through demonstrations and short commands, while 5-year-olds use more verbal communication and abstract explanations. However, it remains unclear whether this generalizes to other cultures. This study presents results from a peer teaching game with 55 Melanesian children (4.7–11.4 years, 24 female) conducted in Vanuatu in 2019. Up to age …

  • Things fall apart

    Open AccessR MaceARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2023

    One of the most interesting emails I received this year was from Masanori Kakaota, a philosophy researcher at Hiroshima University, asking if I was the granddaughter of the moral philosopher turned psychologist C. A. Mace (1894Mace ( -1971)), to which the answer was yes. Rather implausibly, it seems that a somewhat forgotten collection of what appears to be the contents of my grandfather's study was purchased by the state of Japan (a country he n…

  • The cultural evolution of teaching

    Open AccessE Brandl, R Mace et al.ARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2023References: 7

    Teaching is an important process of cultural transmission. Some have argued that human teaching is a cognitive instinct – a form of ‘natural cognition’ centred on mindreading, shaped by genetic evolution for the education of juveniles, and with a normative developmental trajectory driven by the unfolding of a genetically inherited predisposition to teach. Here, we argue instead that human teaching is a culturally evolved trait that exhibits chara…

  • Adoption, Fostering, and Parental Absence in Vanuatu

    Open AccessE Brandl, Emily H Emmott et al.ARTICLEHuman Nature2023Cited by: 1References: 109

    Alloparenting, wherein people provide care to children who are not their biological offspring, is a key aspect of human child-rearing. In the Pacific, many children are adopted or fostered by custodial alloparents even when both biological parents are still alive. From a behavioral ecology perspective, such behaviors are puzzling: why parent someone else's child at your expense? Furthermore, little is known about how these arrangements are made i…

  • Grandpaternal care and child survival in a pastoralist society in western China

    Open AccessJuan Du, Abigail E Page et al.ARTICLEEvolution and Human Behavior2022

    Human parents require significant support to raise multiple, highly dependent offspring. Grandmothers are often highlighted as key allomothers (non-maternal caregivers) and their presence is frequently associated with increased child survivorship, leading some to describe humans as cooperative breeders. Equally well documented is the diversity of human childcare systems, where a wide range of individuals support parents including male kin. Howeve…

  • A phylogenetic analysis of dispersal norms, descent and subsistence in Sino-Tibetans

    Open AccessTing Ji, Hanzhi Zhang et al.ARTICLEEvolution and Human Behavior2022

  • Communal breeding by women is associated with lower investment from husbands

    Open AccessQiao-Qiao He, Jun-Wen Rui et al.ARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2022Cited by: 1References: 9

    According to Hamilton's rule, matrilineal-biased investment restrains men in matrilineal societies from maximising their inclusive fitness (the ‘matrilineal puzzle'). A recent hypothesis argues that when women breed communally and share household resources, a man should help his sisters' household, rather than his wife's household, as investment to the later but not the former would be diluted by other unrelated members (Wu et al., 2013). Accordi…

  • Cultural evolution research needs to include human behavioural ecology

    Alberto J C Micheletti, E J Brandl et al.PREPRINT2022Cited by: 1References: 16

    Human culture changes over time and varies across space. Two main approaches to study cultural evolution have developed in the last fifty years: human behavioural ecology and a suite of perspectives centred on the role of cultural transmission. The latter are often confusingly referred to with the name of the phenomenon they are trying to explain, 'cultural evolution'. We argue that this is unhelpful and is generating confusion, including the cla…

  • Matching Local Knowledge and Environmental Change with Policy Changes in Rangeland Tenure

    Open AccessBai Peng-Peng, Mattia Mancini et al.ARTICLEHuman Ecology2021

    Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons has often been cited as the rationale for the privatization of pastures throughout the world, yet rangeland degradation is still widespread. A significant body of ecological research has demonstrated negative impacts from limiting herd movement through fencing. The privatization of pastures has often followed heterogeneous patterns. We use a natural experiment in common grazing areas on the eastern Qinghai-Tibetan …

  • Cultural extinction in evolutionary perspective

    Open AccessHanzhi Zhang, R MaceARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2021Cited by: 7References: 12

  • A phylogenetic analysis of revolution and afterlife beliefs

    Open AccessKiran Basava, Hanzhi Zhang et al.ARTICLENature Human Behaviour2021Cited by: 2References: 63