Draft:Laura Betzig

• Comment: The entire lead and Early life and education sections are unsourced.
  A google scholar link is not a source. bonadea contributions talk 18:28, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: Inline citation concerns still not addressed. The entire Research section is unreferenced. The fact that the subject has publications does not make one notable, so refs 4-6 do not help establish notability, as they are written by the subject. Please ensure that independent, reliable sources are used throughout the article and back up the text where applicable, and establish the notability of the subject inline with Wikipedia's general notability guidelines. Utopes _{(talk / cont)} 05:22, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: Does not meet the minimum inline citation requirements, as established for a biography of a living person. Sources should be reliable, independent, and provide significant coverage of the subject. Utopes _{(talk / cont)} 20:57, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

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Laura Betzig (born 15 December 1953) is an American anthropologist. She has pioneered the study of human history as natural history. Her focus is on why equality is rare across space and time, and on what conditions make it go up or down. She uses comparative evidence from animal societies, and theory from evolutionary biology, to understand those trends.

Early life and education

Betzig was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Helen Hahn Betzig and Robert Evans Betzig. Her mother's parents were German immigrants who opened a restaurant; her father, the son of a New York cab driver, founded a machine tool company. Betzig got a BA from the University of Michigan in 1975, and a PhD from Northwestern University, under Napoleon Chagnon, in 1983. Betzig has held research and teaching positions at Northwestern, the University of California, and the University of Michigan; she blogs on The Political Animal for Psychology Today, and has answered the Annual Question at Edge.

Research

Betzig and her husband, Paul Turke, did fieldwork in the 1980s on Ifaluk Atoll, home to a small Micronesian chiefdom. They found that when fish were redistributed after island-wide catches, chiefs went home with more than their share; that when taro and other staples were traded on a daily basis, chiefs' households took in more than they gave out; that chiefs were able to spend more time with their daughters and sons; that chiefs adopted out more of their children than they adopted in.  And that they were able to raise bigger families as a result.

A comparative study of 106 politically autonomous societies drawn from the Standard Cross Cultural Sample followed.  Across millennia, on every inhabited continent, Betzig found that political power maps onto sexual access. In societies without hierarchies, successful men number their children in single digits; in societies with big men or chiefs, they father dozens of children; and in the first empires, from the Egyptians of Rameses II to the Inkans of Pachakuti, emperors fathered hundreds of daughters and sons.

Over the last few decades, Betzig has read ancient, medieval, and modern history, and found that political and reproductive privilege have declined at the same time. Roman emperors had sexual access to wives, to the concubines who occupied their palace apartments, and to hundreds or thousands of slaves. Medieval lords were accessible to wives, to the other women who lived in their castles, and to hundreds of women who occupied their estates. Over the past few centuries, as politics have become more egalitarian, household size and composition have, too.

Publications

Betzig has published over a hundred articles, and three books: Despotism and Differential Reproduction (Routledge), Human Reproductive Behaviour (Cambridge), and Human Nature: A Critical Reader (Oxford).

Personal Life

Betzig is married to the anthropologist and pediatrician Paul Turke; they have two children, Alexa and Max. Her brother Eric won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2014.