Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Articles in this Issue
Assessing grand narratives of economic inequality across time
Long-entrenched grand narratives have tied inequality in large human aggregations to generally linear trends, a direct outcome of domestication, then fostered by population growth and/or stepped scala...
Kuznets’ tides: An archaeological perspective on the long-term dynamics of sustainable development
Understanding the relationship between inequality and economic growth is a critical science problem that hinders sustainable development. In 1955, Simon Kuznets hypothesized that rising economic growt...
Changes in agglomeration and productivity are poor predictors of inequality across the archaeological record
We address three basic issues regarding the long-term dynamics of inequality in society. First, we consider the interpretation of residence sizes in socioeconomic terms by comparing statistical patter...
Assessing neighborhoods, wealth differentials, and perceived inequality in preindustrial societies
Humans often live in neighborhoods, nested socio-spatial clusters within settlements of varying size and population density. In today’s cities, neighborhoods are often characterized as relatively homo...
The emergence and loss of cyclic peptides in <i>Nicotiana</i> illuminate dynamics and mechanisms of plant metabolic evolution
Specialized metabolism plays a central role in how plants cope with both biotic and abiotic stresses in order to survive and reproduce within dynamic and challenging environments. One recently describ...
Global warming drives a threefold increase in persistence and 1 <sup>°</sup> C rise in intensity of marine heatwaves
Marine heatwaves are extreme climatic events consisting of persistent periods of warm ocean waters that have profound impacts on marine life. These episodes are becoming more intense, longer, and more...
The world through infant eyes: Evidence for the early emergence of the cardinal orientation bias
The structure of the environment includes more horizontal and vertical (i.e. cardinal) orientations than oblique orientations, meaning that edges tend to be aligned with or perpendicular to the direct...
Targeting the complement lectin pathway with a highly specific MASP-2 inhibitor protects against renal ischemia–reperfusion injury
Renal ischemia–reperfusion injury (IRI) is a common complication in several clinical scenarios including kidney transplantation. Mannan-binding lectin-associated serine proteinase (MASP)-2 is essentia...
War both reduced and increased inequality over the past 10,000 years
Scholars are divided over the long-term effects that war has had on inequality. Some have argued that conflict grows the gap between rich and poor. Others counter that violence levels out wealth diffe...
Toward multiscalar measures of inequality in archaeology
The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure commonly used to characterize distributions of socioeconomic quantities. Archaeologists and social scientists have recently adopted this method to analyze...
Labor, land, and the global dynamics of economic inequality
Here, we assess the extent to which land use relating to food acquisition (farming, herding, foraging) and associated value regimes shaped past economic inequality. We consider the hypothesis that lan...
100 generations of wealth equality after the Neolithic transitions
From Rousseau onward, scholars have identified the transition to sedentary agriculture as crucial to the history of wealth inequality. Here, using the GINI project’s global database on disparities in...
Economic inequality is fueled by population scale, land-limited production, and settlement hierarchies across the archaeological record
Defining wealth broadly to include wealth in people, relational connections, and material possessions, we examine the prehistory of wealth inequality at the level of the residential units using the co...
A 5-HT-mediated urethral defense against urinary tract infections
The urethra is considered a passive conduit for urine. Here, we reveal a surprising multicellular signaling pathway guiding the urethra’s dynamic response to an invading pathogen. Using a genetic appr...
Reconsidering indoor residual spraying coverage targets: A retrospective analysis of high-resolution programmatic malaria control data
Indoor residual spraying (IRS) is one of the core vector control interventions available to malaria control programs. Normative and scientific guidance has long held that very high IRS coverage (at le...
Housing inequality and settlement persistence are associated across the archaeological record
Definitions of sustainability commonly stress both systemic continuity and equality over time. However, the degree to which these two sides of sustainability might be related has not been systematical...