James Holland Jones

News

Measuring Hunter-Gatherer Mobility

Great to see this paper on the movement ecology of Hadza hunter-gatherers finally out in Nature Human Behavior. Lead author Brian Wood began the data collection when he was a post-doc with me at Stanford over a decade ago. The analysis is based on over 23,000 person-hours of observation and it this really provides a sense of the sort of time scales that are required for rigorous scientific anthropology. This was a monumental data-collection and data-analysis effort.

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Anti-Racism and COVID-19 Epidemiology

I was thrilled to see our paper, "Reparations for Black American descendants of persons enslaved in the U.S. and their potential impact on SARS-CoV-2 transmission," published in Social Science & Medicine this month. This was a huge team effort organized by former PhD student Gene Richardson. The Harvard press service did a nice write-up of the paper here.

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Plenary Talk for Theme 3, Predictive Intelligence and Pandemic Preparedness

In addition to serving as the PI for Theme 4 of the NSF initiative, Predictive Intelligence and Pandemic Preparedness, I was invited by Theme 3 to give a plenary talk for their workshop. The format of the workshop was flipped and plenary speakers pre-recorded their talks.

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Predictive Intelligence and Pandemic Prevention

In December, I was approached by program officers from NSF about an initiative called "Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention" (PIPP). The objective for this program is to gather information about what we have learned from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to better prepare ourselves for what are, alas, inevitable future pandemics.

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Adaptation Galore

We've made tremendous progress with our special issue of The American Journal of Human Biology dedicated to anthropology and climate-change adaptation.

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Two New Papers on Adaptation

Anne Pisor and I organized a special issue of the American Journal of Human Biology from papers from our 2020 Wiley Symposium at AAPAs, "Human Responses to Climate Change: What Anthropologists Want Climate Scientists and Policymakers to Know." Alas, the 2020 AAPAs were canceled because of COVID-19, but we kept going with the special issue. This has been coming together over the last month or so as papers get revised and published.

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Preprint on Adaptation

Elspeth Ready, Anne Pisor, and I have a new preprint out entitled, "Want Climate-Change Adaptation? Evolutionary Theory Can Help." This paper, which emerged from Anne's and my AAPA Symposium on biological anthropology and climate change, is about equal parts review and theoretical treatise on the idea of adaptation.

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New Paper on COVID-19 Dynamics

It's nice to see that our paper that was solicited by the American Journal of Human Biology on SARS CoV-2 transmission dynamics was published this week. AJHB has a whole open-access special issue on human biologists' perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Life History Theory in Ten Papers

Ever since things started going horizontal in the Anthropology Department, I haven't had much student interest in my graduate class, Demography and Life History Theory. This means that I really haven't taught my bread-and-butter (graduate) class since 2013. This is frustrating for many reasons, but one key frustration is that I get a lot of people at other institutions telling me that they wish they could take my life history class.

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New Project, New Position

I'm very excited about a new project that will be starting soon at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The tentative title of the project is simply Nature-Human-Machine Partnerships. The goals of the project are still subject to debate, but a key outcome will be to think about how we achieve a more sustainable and equitable world by reconsidering our relationships with both nature and machines as well as the relationship between nature and machines.

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