Quality of Life from an Evolutionary Perspective
Evolution is supposed to adapt organisms to their environments, but the human species seems bent upon its own destruction. Everyone is familiar with the drumbeat of potential calamities: violent conflict…weapons of mass destruction…overpopulation…economic collapse…extreme inequality…environmental degradation….
We expect the workshop to result in a new agenda for basic scientific research, policy formulation, and policy implementation that can begin immediately.
Why do we engage in such self-destructive practices and is it possible to create a more fulfilling and sustainable culture for the future? Many people are attempting to accomplish this goal under the rubric of “Quality of Life (QOL)”. A high QOL is both personally fulfilling and sustainable over the long term. Interest in QOL has grown to the point that there is now an International Society for Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS) consisting of over 300 scholars.
It is especially important to develop numerical indices of QOL so that it can be monitored in the same way as economic indices. Creating a serviceable QOL index is the first step toward basing public policy on QOL rather than short-term economic growth. A number of QOL indices have been developed, including the United Nation’s Human Development Index.
While QOL is being approached from many perspectives, it has not yet been approached from an explicitly evolutionary perspective. This is unfortunate, because evolutionary science can make a number of fundamental contributions to the study of QOL as outlined in the attached white paper.
Although all of our focal topics bear upon quality of life, we are making QOL a focus in its own right with a workshop that will be held at the University of Memphis on November 4-7, 2011. The workshop will bring leading scholars and policymakers who are already studying QOL together with leading evolutionists to explore what an explicitly evolutionary approach to QOL can add to the excellent work that is already being done.
We expect the workshop to result in a new agenda for basic scientific research, policy formulation, and policy implementation that can begin immediately. The fact that organizations such as the ISQOL and United Nations will be represented at the workshop means that the results will be quickly disseminated throughout the existing QOL community. In addition, the workshop is being held in Memphis to interface with the University of Memphis’s Graduate Program in City and Regional Planning headed by Prof. Ken Reardon, so that Memphis can serve as a research and implementation site. Other potential implementation sites include the city of Binghamton, New York, based on the Binghamton Neighborhood Project directed by David Sloan Wilson, and East Tampa, Florida, based on EI projects directed by Jerry Lieberman. Still other opportunities for research and implementation are afforded through our partnerships with organizations such as the Promise Neighborhood Research Consortium, the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, and the Equality Trust. In this fashion, we expect to make immediate progress defining, measuring, and increasing the QOL of real-world human populations.
Reading List
Stephen Bezruchka: Epidemiological approaches to population Health, Health equity in the USA
Sarah Cook: Combating Poverty and Inequality
Nicholas D. Kristof: America’s ‘Primal Scream”.
Daniel Nettle: Variation in Cooperative Behaviour within a Single City
David J. Rothkopf, Redefining the Meaning of No 1.
M. Joseph Sirgy: Theoretical Perspectives Guiding Indicator Projects.
David Sloan Wilson: Evolving the Future: Toward a Science of Intentional Change
David Sloan Wilson: A Program for At risk High School Students Informed by Evolutionary Science
