Morphological and population genomic evidence that human faces have evolved to signal individual identity.

Facial recognition plays a key role in human interactions, and there has been great interest in understanding the evolution of human abilities for individual recognition and tracking social relationships. Individual recognition requires sufficient cognitive abilities and phenotypic diversity within a population for discrimination to be possible. Despite the importance of facial recognition in humans, the evolution of facial identity has received little attention. Here we demonstrate that faces evolved to signal individual identity under negative frequency-dependent selection. Faces show elevated phenotypic variation and lower between-trait correlations compared with other traits. Regions surrounding face-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms show elevated diversity consistent with frequency-dependent selection. Genetic variation maintained by identity signalling tends to be shared across populations and, for some loci, predates the origin of Homo sapiens. Studies of human social evolution tend to emphasize cognitive adaptations, but we show that social evolution has shaped patterns of human phenotypic and genetic diversity as well

The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop

Review of Chavez, Felicia Rose. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop : How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2021

Protecting Life and Lung: Protected Areas Affect Fine Particulate Matter and Respiratory Hospitalizations in the Brazilian Amazon Biome.

I assessed the impacts of upwind protected area coverage on local respiratory health within the Brazilian Amazon. A hypothesized mechanism is the legal prohibition of human ignited fires within protected areas, reducing particulate matter pollution, impacting respiratory health downwind. The connection between fires and respiratory diseases in the Amazon is well established (Smith et al. 2014; Rangel and Vogl 2019; Rocha and Sant’anna 2020). What is not well understood is the potential that government policies aimed at preventing ecosystem loss may also promote health and wellbeing, combining the UN sustainable development goals 3 and 15. Protected areas currently dominate government conservation efforts across the globe, but empirical evidence of the health impacts of protected areas remains a small body of literature. I combined Brazilian government data for monthly municipal respiratory disease hospitalizations and monthly upwind protected area coverage. I utilized a fixed-effects model with socioeconomic and environmental controls to isolate changes in upwind PA coverage on changes in respiratory disease hospitalizations. This research highlighted the cross-boundary effects of protected areas on health and the potential for government policy synergies between environmental conservation and public health. To my knowledge, this was the first examination of upwind protected areas\u27 impacts on downwind health outcomes